EKONOMICKÝ A SOCIÁLNY ROZVOJ SLOVENSKA

26
Education and employment in the public administration sphere
Dear participants, ladies and gentlemen,
Let me welcome you at this year’s international Economic and Social Development
of Slovakia conference. One of the conference topics is administration and manage-
ment. Let me stop for a while and give you some comments on this topic. Good ad-
ministration and management should ensure citizens that democratic principles work
on all levels of state administration. Important changes in the life of Slovak society put
requirements not only on responsible representatives of public administration bodies
but mainly on its employees that represent first and often the last article in the contact
between the citizen and the institution of public administration. These facts require
continuous enhancement in qualification, improvement of personal approach to citi-
zens and professionalism from employees and representatives of public administra-
tion not only in the contact with the citizen but towards interested bodies cooperating
on tackling civil issues.
Public administration employees’ education is the objective and mission of the
School of Economics and Management in Public Administration in Bratislava. School
management has since its establishment been building a school that is an educational
institution in which its graduates will meet requirements from practice. The aim of
our effort is to educate graduates that will be able to apply gained knowledge in prac-
tice, generalise own experience, analyse current problems and prepare decisions in
terms of public administration. Consequently, they will be able to make decisions on
leading positions, perform individual analytic and conceptual activities, handle pa-
perwork on administrative and technical positions, and process information by office
and information technologies, etc.
For illustration, let me mention several numbers that give evidence of develop-
ment and structure of employees in public administration sector. For example, in
2001, 412,505 people were employed in public administration sector; this number
decreased to 362,533 in the year 2009. In 2010, the estimated number of employees
is 357,743. The facts show us that currently, approximately 360,000 employees work
in public administration and the development of the employment is decreasing. The
changes were mainly influenced by process of public administration decentralisation
that was finished on 1 January 2005 by launching fiscal decentralisation system.
It is undisputable that graduates of private higher education schools participate