Bermuda is expected to establish an assessment centre for top civil servants in the new year.

Public Service Commission director Judith Hall Bean last week told The Royal Gazette that representatives from two assessment firms in the US were scheduled to visit the Island this week to meet with PSC officials on the matter.

And she said there was already a pool of some 50 Government personnel eligible to go through the centre which is slated to be set up in January.

"We have been looking at our needs for the year 2000,'' Mrs. Hall Bean explained. "We got heads of the department to do a list of posts they think will be vacated in the next three to five years. They did that. Then they looked at people they think will be future prospects for those posts.'' As a result of the exercise, she said, department heads made a list of more than 85 civil servants who they believed could benefit from future development.

"Then we went to the nominees themselves and asked officers to nominate themselves if they were interested or withdraw their names,'' Mrs. Hall Bean further explained.

To be eligible for the pool, Government workers had to be Bermudian, at the PS36 scale (earning a salary of about $71,000) or equivalent, have a Bachelor's degree or an equivalent qualification, and be under 55 years of age.

"We looked for people who filled the eligibility requirements and those in middle management who have potential to be Permanent Secretaries or fill other top civil servant posts,'' Mrs. Hall Bean said.

Personnel Services expected the centre to assess the individual strengths of those who go through it and their developmental needs.

She pointed out that there were nine fundamental qualifications a manager needed to be competent, including planning and organisational skills, decision making, and problem solving skills, leadership skills, and "emotional resilience''.

"This assessment is going to be covering all these areas, then there will be a succession of exercises,'' Mrs. Hall Bean said.

Bermuda was looking at hiring either UK-based Saville and Holdsworth, which has an office in the US, or the Centre for Creative Leadership which is also located in the US.

"We're in discussions with both of these companies on running the centre,'' she said.

A group of top civil servants and heads of the PSC will decide which company to use.

"The company chosen will give Government a development plan for such assessments which will, for example, say person A is ready for position A but he or she needs more courses in various areas. That will tell us what this individual needs.'' The decision on which firm is chosen will come down to cost and which company best met Bermuda's specific needs.

She said the centre was "purely to assess'' civil servants and not to handpick favoured Government employees for top posts.

And she pointed out that skill development was not new to Personnel Services.

"We've had a management development programme going on for the past six years,'' she said.

"It started with a senior management programme which took 15 middle management people and put them through a structured programme for two years,'' Mrs. Hall Bean noted. "We did that in house.

"Then we had a middle management development programme and a supervisor management programme for entry management positions.

"It's like any other organisation. We looked at people and where they wanted to be when they retired.''