The ongoing professional education of civil servants in Russia and other countries: A comparative analysis

Abstract

The paper presents a comparative analysis exploring the ongoing professional education of public services' executives in Russia and other countries (namely Hungary and Germany). Life-long learning has gained importance over the past years, especially in civil service with its high level of job security and low overall turnover. The motivation of the research was the fact that researchers have observed a significant link between the civil service effectiveness and the education approaches. Therefore a deeper understanding of the main conditions affecting the content and framework of ongoing education could become the basis of positive changes. The focal question of the research was to assess whether the reviewed countries have differences in the educational approach to in-service ongoing education. The reviewed countries have different political, social and economic contexts surrounding public administration education, different public administration systems and, most importantly, different levels of civil service system efficiency. Consequently, by finding the differences we could conclude that the professional training system is influenced by the practice of public administration in a given country. The similarities between them can prove that the training system follows the mainstream governance theory but not the current context in a country. The study explores the political and social context of the civil servants' education, and characteristics of civil service professional trainings in the reviewed countries in terms of the legal and organizational framework, funding, and prevailing teaching approach. We can conclude that the training systems and programs in the countries are noticeably different. But as we went deeper into analysis we had found that the key external factor is not the socio-political context itself but some underlying conditions, especially the prevailing concept of State and the level of the government control in education. The features of the training system itself have a weak link to civil service efficiency comparing to the content of programmes, but this conclusion requires additional study with more countries.