An empirical study on: talent management practices in public sector universities

Abstract

The CEOs and the top level management of renowned firms of the world implement talent management to build a pool of competent employees. An effective and formal mechanism to implement these strategies helps the organization to strengthen the human resource management process in order to effectively recruit and select , train and develop, retain and compensate talented employees for the firm who are their valuable assets. The research has been conducted in the education sector specifically relating to the public sector universities to analyze the talent management practices. For the Government of Pakistan education is a low budget category sector because of which these public sector universities hardly have essential budget to spend on their faculty and employees. The management must concentrate on the research oriented activities and most importantly pursuing, retention and compensation policies concerning talented faculty members, the latter being critical for the former. Also, there is immense government and political influence on the administrative policies of these universities. The rules and regulation where reference based hiring approach is given a priority over a merit based system has negatively impacted resulting in talented and deserving employees being left behind. If the talented employees join these universities then there are no formal compensation and development policies for retaining them. Due to these reasons the employees working in these institutions are not competitive and motivated enough to improve the education standards and provide quality education to the students. In this era of globalization and competition, institutions need to revamp their traditional human resource policies in order to cater for the ever changing and demanding attitude of employees towards the job. The bureaucratic philosophy embedded at all the hierarchal levels needs to be changed by honest and talented people. All the human resource processes must be strategically aligned with institution and employee needs and wants to fulfill their ultimate goal i.e. betterment of education standards through quality education. In my thesis I will highlight the factors that are affecting the public sector institutions’ talent management strategies and identify the building blocks needed to improve these strategies.