Link between higher education, productivity and leadership

On the face of it, the directive by the Public Service Commission (PSC) that senior officers in the public service acquire masters’ degrees within the next two years is laudable because it is generally the case that the higher education of an individual the higher their productivity.

However, in reality most employees and even some employers do not seem to realise that there is a triangular relationship between education, productivity and earnings and tend to focus more on education and earnings such that the correlation between education and productivity is downplayed.

Employees upon acquiring higher qualifications demand for higher positions and the attendant pay well before demonstrating that they have become more productive on account of the higher qualification acquired. Let us consider evaluation of productivity in an era of performance management.

In performance contracting, the employer demands for higher outputs from the employee through service delivery and actual measurable quantities of products of the organisation. The employer does not pay attention to the inputs from the employee such as education as long as the outputs are satisfactory.

In the civil service the current outputs are measured through absorption of allocated resources, collection of Appropriations-in-Aid, reduction of pending bills, implementation of citizens’ service charters and digitisation of government services. Other outputs include resolution of public complaints, implementation of presidential directives, affirmative action in procurement of goods and services and asset management.

There is nothing in the performance contract template emanating from the Ministry of Public Service and Human Resource Management in collaboration with the PSC that these outputs can only be achieved by those with postgraduate degrees.

In fact, public servants with first degrees deployed to their respective areas of specialisation and provided with the necessary resources and political goodwill often perform well given the experiences that they acquire as they scale up the ladder in the service.

For illustrative purposes, consider the example of government employed drivers. A driver who left school at primary school level or Form 4, joined the National Youth Service and trained as a driver and got employed say in 1990 at the age of 20 is still in service in 2025 at the age of 55 years. That driver would most likely have started by driving manual Land Rovers and small Toyota models that were commonly used in government then.

Over time, automatically gear changing vehicles such as Toyota Prados and Volkswagen Passats have been acquired and driven by the same drivers without acquiring higher educational qualifications. In fact these drivers are more adept in their duties than the bosses—with much more superior educational qualifications— that they serve because that is their area of specialisation and competency.

It is this logic that makes me think that forcing a 55-year-old director to undergo a masters’ programme when they have served for 30 years with first degrees and attended many ‘result-oriented management courses’ and achieve the set outputs as per their respective performance contracts should not be penalised.

Doing so would be like not recognising the evaluation outcomes of performance contracts that we have embraced for two decades. To me the PSC needs to focus more on advising their superiors to deploy Cabinet and Principal Secretaries to dockets of their educational specialisation and competencies so that they can gel with the said directors easily and quickly.

Let the government synergise its laws, policies and programmes with the available human, financial and material resources.

Mr Sogomo,an education specialist, is former Secretary TSC, [email protected], @Bsogomo