Utilisation of qualified labour in Danish public administration
by Henrik Christoffersen, Morten Marott Larsen, Bjarne Madsen and Olaf Rieper, November 2006
Summary
The analyses that make up this report have been carried out by a taskforce under the Danish Ministry of Education commissioned to assess educational programmes in public management in the light of the need for qualified labour in Danish public administration.
While working on the report, it became clear that there was only a limited initial understanding of the utilisation of qualified labour in Danish public administration. Similarly, we became aware of the fact that in several contexts assessments have been made of the consequences of the need for qualified labour in connection with the present modernisation of the structure of the public sector, but that these assessments have been the result of a series of subanalyses covering various public sectors. In contrast, there has been no holistic assessment of the entire public administration system. This report uses registry data and questionnaires to establish a complete picture of how the pattern of utilisation of qualified labour has changed in recent years. This report also seeks to increase our understanding of the future demand for qualifications in public management based on committee work and other subanalyses, on the most recent research in skills enhancement programmes within public management as well as on interviews with senior officials in the public sector.
The analyses in this report draw an overall picture of the structures, trends and perspectives we see today. With regard to the perspectives, in particular, emphasis is placed on outlining the direction in which the trends are moving. This means focusing, in particular, on the relatively long-term perspective. In this way, the emphasis is on academic workers ultimately playing a much larger role in the Danish public administration, because this is the trend we see in the long-term. When reading these analyses, it is also important to bear in mind that in the short and medium-term a situation will develop in which employees with a higher, though not academic, level of education will continue to play a major role.
Since the beginning of the 1980s, the approach to the structure of public administration in Denmark has been influenced by the theory of New Public Management, which seeks to take concepts from market economics and apply them to public administration. Important features here are that the operating organisational units in the welfare sector are increasingly made more business-like, concurrently developing a stronger focus on competition and freedom of choice, and with the explicit verification of results and effects.
In recent years, this trend has begun to change into a more specific awareness of the underlying factors that can enable the public welfare sector to increase its ability to create quality and value in relation to staff size. This is where the concept of the knowledge society comes in. This concept paves the way for the possibility of producing progress in the quality and value of welfare production compared to staff size by intensifying the utilisation of knowledge and competencies in the production of the welfare sector. Focusing on the importance of professionalisation results in an overall renewal of concepts about organisation, management and steering. Thus, new freedom is needed in terms of the professional competencies if they are to influence production and results. And employees must be given the opportunity to expand their knowledge and competencies within these areas. This typically sets the stage for coordination and a more widespread specialisation, which again inspires new ways to create organisational continuity and unity. In connection with this type of development process, a specialisation process also takes place in relation to administrative and managerial work in the operating organisational units. This type of development was observed at an early stage in the hospital sector, where it resulted in clashes between different types of competencies and skills, with the label of »DJØFisation« (in reference to the Association of Danish Lawyers and Economists) being given to the phenomenon of more workers with degrees in law and economics appearing in the labour force.
As regards the overall steering and management, greater focus on targets, visions, values, etc. is required, while the details of production decisions are left to the frontline. As the foundation for this type of management and steering, strong competencies are needed in the areas of analysis, strategic planning, results assessment, communication, etc.
Chapter 4 of this report presents a study based on registry statistics of the educational patterns that have characterised the public administration labour force in recent years. The basic conclusion of the study is that these educational patterns have changed, and they have done so both quickly and markedly. During the period from 1996 to 2003, there has been a significant reduction in the employment of workers without any qualifying education in public management. Similarly, workers with a higher education have begun to have a significantly stronger influence. Local authorities have begun to utilise academic workers to a greater extent. Thus we see, during this period, a doubling of the number of employees in the local authorities with a long-cycle higher education in public management. The registry data used from Statistics Denmark does not contain information on the further education programmes within the individual sectors, which are primarily run by the Center for Offentlig Kompetenceudvikling (Centre for public competency development) and Danmarks Forvaltningshøjskole (Danish college of public administration). However, these programmes have come to play a significant role in relation to trained office workers.
The registry statistics analysis also indicates some clear regional differences in the educational profiles of public sector workers and consequently in the way the regional labour markets operate. In this context it is relevant that continuing and further education can be considered an alternative to employing workers with basic education at a higher level. Based on information from a survey of senior officials in the public sector, we have no unambiguous the picture of whether basic education on the one hand and continuing and further education on the other work as substitutes. The study only enables us to shed light on this point in the public sector. However, it does appear as though basic education and continuing and further education have an almost mutually complementary relationship, so we see local governments with a high level of education among its workers and other local governments with a lower level of education.
The professionalisation of public sector workers that is apparent in the registry data analysis expresses a trend that also forms the basis for considerations about the structural modernisation of the public sector in a number of studies and reports within the different sectors. For instance, reports on the organisation of the police and on the organisation of the courts heavily emphasise the fact that the creation of larger organisational units can produce the organisational framework for a stronger specialisation, including specialisation and professionalisation of the administrative and managerial tasks. The Danish Local Government Restructuring Commission focuses to a great extent on making the local government units larger with a view to being able to take on more tasks. But also here the perspectives point to greater professional sustainability. As another aspect of structural modernisation, the reports mentioned here also point to the perspectives of the automation of functions and the development of management based on a more widespread utilisation of IT. From this point of view, the functions that are characterised by requiring only limited qualifications will be absorbed by the more efficient automated systems.
This project’s questionnaire study of senior officials in the public sector enables us, to a certain extent, to combine the descriptions from the registry statistics with the understanding that exists in the management of the public administration. One interesting observation is that the initial assessment of the senior officials in the public sector of the strength of the public sector workers’ educational enhancement appears to be distinctly moderate compared to the actual rapid improvement in educational level that can be seen in the registry data.
The senior officials in the public sector were also asked for their assessment of which educational qualifications would come to influence the demand for qualified labour in the public sector of the future. There seem to be certain priorities, but on the other hand it is also clear from the response patterns that they do not provide a very narrow specification of the competencies needed. This, then, probably also means that there are limits to the extent to which there is basis for pointing to a specific and strictly defined set of qualifications that would be adequate for the needs of the public administration. However, there is a strong trend towards skills that can be described as general administration competencies becoming less relevant. In turn, a wide variety of sharply characterised professional competencies are emphasised. In this context, there are also indications that diversity and flexibility will have a strong influence.
This conclusion can be seen in relation to the picture drawn by the interview surveys conducted. One emphasis here is on the need for stronger basic education that develops a solid understanding of fundamental methodological competencies and professionalism. Similarly, the need for flexibility is also emphasised as the starting point for performing numerous and varying tasks in continuously changing contexts. In this connection, it should be noted that training programmes which are too specific in connection with staff organisation in the labour market can result in unnecessary barriers to flexibility.
Based on the registry data set which was created for the descriptive data analysis, this report also carries out a projection up to 2015 of the labour market situation for Danish public administration. This projection sheds light on the consequences that will result if recent years’ developments in commuting patterns continue, if demographic developments are taken into account and if the general increase in level of education also continues. Thus, this projection emphasises the three fundamental balance problems:
First, people without some sort of qualifying education will be squeezed out of the labour market. There will be significantly fewer people within this category, but the number of jobs will decline even more markedly.
Second, a significant flexibility problem will develop in the labour market, where the demand for people with various types of higher education initially will vary greatly, but where the overall situation will be characterised by high demand. Thus, we expect initially to see significant positive unemployment among workers with academic degrees in the humanities and significant negative unemployment among workers with academic degrees in the social sciences.
Finally, the projection also points to the fact that these balance problems will change in character and strength in the different regions of the country.
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