Capacity building amongst road safety officials with specific reference to the work of the Boekenhout Traffic College

Abstract

Paper presented at the 20th Annual South African Transport Conference 16 - 20 July 2001 "Meeting the transport challenges in Southern Africa", CSIR International Convention Centre, Pretoria, South Africa.

The future has suddenly and dramatically became the present! Due to the rapidly changing and increasingly more challenging road safety environment, medium to long term plans for staff capacitation are substituted by immediate and short term training and development actions. Traffic Management in Gauteng is no longer defined by what it does, but what it delivers. Maximising performance is one of the highest priorities for the traffic fraternity. Training is something we have to integrate into every manager’s mindset. Nothing is more important than growing our high performers and simultaneously training and developing our new recruits as part of a comprehensive capacitation program. We came to realise that if we want to achieve our goal of reducing the carnage on our roads by 10% per annum, the training and capacity building of road safety officials require much more than only training new recruits the curricula of basic courses focussing on Road Safety Acts and Regulations. Training and capacity building should go beyond being successful in integrating practical exposure with the theoretical curricula. The challenge lies in a successful ongoing multidisciplinary and multi-skilling process whereby road safety officials’ knowledge, skills and attitudes are aligned with the requirements of an increasingly complex road safety environment. In the past, the most important role Boekenhoutkloof Traffic Training College played was to present standardised basic and advanced courses. The new challenge today is to also perform ongoing evaluation and validation, gap analysis between competencies required and demonstrated and creation of opportunities for skills development for road safety officials. The future requires a comprehensive, integrated and holistic approach whereby training specialists as well as supervisors and managers in all road safety disciplines work together to achieve staff capacitation objectives. We've learned from past experiences that the recruitment and selection of staff involves much more than only choosing the best available person. Selecting the appropriate set of knowledge, skills and abilities, which come packaged in a person, is an effort to get a “fit” between what the applicant can and want to do and what the Directorate needs. However, good training will not make up the bad selection of staff! This paper intends to provide an outline of the integrated approach that the Directorate : Traffic Management of the Gauteng Department of Transport follows to capacitate road safety officials and to highlight the role and contribution of the Boekenhoutkloof Traffic College in the capacitation process.