Exit Policy Aims to Encourage Retirement for Public Servants.
Navigating life after the public service for most retiring public servants in the country continues to be challenging and confusing time for some of those public servants , who have not strategically planned out their retirement life.
Department of Personnel Management through the Strategic Policy Development Division have been working on the development of a Retirement Exit Policy, that will set a standard for each agency to prepare their officers who are ready for retirement.
Executive Manager for the Strategic Policy Development Division Ms. Ida Yuki said the Department through the division is putting together four priority policies which the retirement exit policy will provide guidelines on how to exit retired public servants.
Ms. Yuki said one of the main reasons that drives the development of this policy is the fact that, most retired public servants do not know what to do after they retire and exit the public service . This is because their entire life have been spent on a fourteen-day work period, where they have their salaries to rely on and when they leave the public service, they do not know what to do.
“For a lot of public servants who have retired, there is no program that prepares them for a life after public service and so through a decision by the government DPM has prioritized this and took it on as a project,” said Ms. Yuki.
“There are a lot activities that they can be engaged in which will be useful and can sustain themselves after retirement, that’s why we chose to pursue this policy”.
This policy will set the standards of how each agency upon retiring their employees on retirement grounds, they have to get into a program that will prepare them psychologically, physically and economically as they prepare for retirement.
Although the exit policy has been perceived as a legacy policy due to different circumstances over the years, it is still a priority policy of the department to see it eventuate and implemented.
Ms. Yuki said recently a validation workshop of all the four priority policies for the division was conducted and refinement needs to be done to the policies.
“When a policy goes out its already sets the platform for operations and implementation, so it’s got to cover all areas and we with that we realized the drafts that we had has to be refined” she said.
The exit policy will also have guidelines for an exit strategy program, that public servants who have served for fifteen years or more and are ready for retirement can be registered on this program so that they can be engaged in small and medium size enterprises when they retire.
Ms. Yuki said another highlight of the exit policy is the creation of a database that will keep information of retired public servants who have registered under the exit strategy program .
And if an agency has a priority program of which they are looking for certain expertise, they can search from their database and see if anybody is qualified to meet their requirements so that they can engage them.