Course at Development Academy of the Philippines

Senior and middle government executives are required to take a special three to four- month course at the Development Academy of the Philippines before they are promoted.

Tony D. Kalaw Jr., DAP president, said the curriculum offered by the Academy under its Public Management Development Program is built round the three learning areas of Governance and Development, Strategic Public Management, and Personal Efficacy and Leadership.

Kalaw said the PMDP has gained the full support of the Aquino administration which issued Memorandum Circular No. 41 last Nov 19, 2012.

The Memo mandated all government agencies to send senior and middle executives to first undergo the three to four-month course to develop a core of development-oriented, competent, dedicated, and accountable government executives.

To know what extent the program has made, DAP asked the National Statistics Office to send its senior executives, nine of whom took the course at DAP.

In reply, Carmelita N. Ericta, NSO administrator and civil registrar general, said the training program has generated a culture of excellence that enhanced competencies, skills in problem solving, strategic thinking in looking at the bigger picture and find "not only solutions but (to aim for) sustainability of efforts" in the context of the agency's national mandate.

"It's high time government has a program that would produce a common culture of excellence especially among its senior officials," Ericta added.

She cited the marked improvement of the four NSO scholars as a result of the DAP training that enabled them to see the relationship of the office to the overall government picture, particularly on the importance of statistics to good government policy and problem solving.

Since the DAP-trained scholars re-entered NSO, Ericta noted that "great effects (have taken place) since NSO has problems which could not have been solved without the training."

She described NSO under her administration as in a period of transition "from the dark before the dawn."

Ericta, herself a statistician of the old school, envisions an NSO that will have to eventually be handed down to a younger and more technologically adept generation.