During a panel discussing senior executive development programmes in the government, the Associate Director at the Office of Personnel Management in the US, Mark Reinhold, presented the US management system and how they have developed it.
Reinhold said that a number of employees at the US executive system would leave their jobs as the administration changes.
Discussing whether Egypt can transfer the US experience in order to improve its management system, the founder of ProMark Ltd. said that in general, Egypt can transfer the whole system, but in order to be successfully implemented, the Egyptian culture must be taken in consideration.
Responding to a question regarding the over-employment in the government, the panel said the Egyptian government must downsize the number of employees in order to reduce bureaucracy. This is in light of the Egyptian public service sector includes 6.5 million employee serving 85 million citizens, while the US public service sector includes only 2 million employees serving around 300 million citizens.
In the 1980s, the Egyptian public service sector included 1.2 million employees, which means that the rate is increasing faster than development, said Microsoft’s Corporate Affairs Manager in Egypt and the Gulf, Ashraf Abdel Wahab.
Abdel Wahab added that the reason behind the large number of government employees was that in the 1980s, the unemployment rate was significantly high, which led the government to hire more people.
To reduce this number, the government must stop hiring more employees and have a long term plan in order to ensure that qualified individuals are not lost during the downsizing process.
