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Public service promotions Last October when Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham suggested that persons moving up the ranks in the Public Service should be promoted based on their abilities to perform rather than "paper qualifications," his remarks were fully endorsed by John Pinder, president of the Bahamas Public Services Union. Like Pinder, we agree that it is "unfortunate that the public service only puts emphasis on qualifications when a person is being promoted," and that it is totally "unfair for persons who are capable of performing a particular task and who have been doing it for a number of years, and just because they lack one little subject or some paper qualifications, they are not able to be promoted to those positions." Of course, an academic degree is a good yardstick to determine whether someone should be considered for a position, but a person's performance after being on the job for a period of time should be the barometer by which his or her level of competence is gauged. Certainly, fairness dictates that if someone without similar "paper qualifications" is more competent and has demonstrated that they are capable of doing a better job than the person with a degree, that person should get the promotion. In years past, prior to The Bahamas becoming an independent nation, very few, if any, entry-level jobs in the civil service required a degree. Indeed, many individuals who climbed the ladder to leadership positions in the civil service did not have a degree, and they were highly proficient in the jobs they did. That's primarily because they entered the civil service with a very good basic education. Indeed, The Bahamas, as a British colony before it became an independent nation, benefited tremendously from some excellent institutions put in place by Great Britain in all of its colonies – including exceptional educational, judicial and political systems steeped in the well-established British tradition. There was no question that the educational system was first rate, and in a sense was tailored and designed to provide a good basic education to the youth of The Bahamas. Generally, students were required to attend school up to the age of 14, when they took an examination to qualify for what was literally referred to as a "Leaving Certificate." Some students, of course, whose parents could afford the tuition fee, sat examinations at some point before they were 14 for entry into the Government High School or one of the church-operated high schools. For the most part, however, the vast majority of Bahamian children in New Providence were educated in government schools that took their names from the area in which they were located: Southern Junior and Senior, Western Junior and Senior, and Eastern Junior and Senior. There is a consensus among former students of these schools who passed the "Leaving Certificate" examination that the level of education they received was superior to what those graduating from our high schools today leave school with. In fact, those who continued in school and received their "Junior Certificate" a year or two later easily qualified for entry-level jobs in the civil service. Many of them, indeed, went on to have lifelong careers in the public service and some who advanced their educational achievements through correspondence or locally-provided courses ended up in leading positions in the civil service. Certainly, there are some public servants today who followed a similar career path, and these are the ones that the prime minister and John Pinder are referring to when they say they should not be denied a promotion because they do not have "paper qualifications." We fully agree. Friday, June 19, 2009