Box 12.6
Training master plan
A training master plan should do ten things: • Identify training objectives and targets (based on a needs review and human resources capacity assessments). • Classify training priorities by subject area, target audience, and means of delivery. • Propose training courses or programs, indicating those that exist already and those that will need to be developed. • Set requirements for internal staff trainers, to ensure that training skills are transferred. • Set procedures for trainee and internal trainer selection. • Create manuals and documentation for training courses, conferences, and workshops. • Outline terms of reference and contracts for trainees. • Create a strategic training framework showing how the plans will be met, including a training timetable for course participants and trainers. • Set up a quality control monitoring program, including continual reviews (for example, feedback questionnaires and informal discussions). • Set up a program for the long term monitoring and upgrading of training capacities.
locations. Such equality of opportunity can be ensured by developing course materials in a modular form and by making them available to staff everywhere (as in distance learning). Technical training, for example, can be broken into three or four difficulty levels, and a set of modules for each can be distributed in whatever way is most convenient for offices. Staff members can then complete each module in sequence, as far as their various development paths may lead them. To enhance training with face to face tutoring, expert officers can become mentors for a region. The system described here can be applied to materials such as those made available through the World Customs Organization e-learning scheme. Management must support these broad training approaches by developing and putting in place individual plans for each officer. These plans should be reviewed and adjusted each year as part of performance management. Supervisors have a responsibility to counsel staff on their individual development—to remedy any deficiencies, and to help staff members
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realize their potential. Such counseling can be part of a planned transfer or promotion regime for staff. Interagency arrangements
Border management needs to focus on developing practical interagency arrangements. In some cases this means the amalgamation, or full integration, of agencies. In other cases it means major policy and operational coordination in resource use—for example, in information and intelligence. Some customs agencies already have a longstanding responsibility to conduct primary health and immigration checks on persons entering the country, with support from secondary referral desks staffed by the agencies mainly responsible for those areas. A government’s reasons for assigning these tasks to customs may include resource constraints and a desire to further national interests (for example, by promoting tourism). Underpinning the arrangements may be extensive service level agreements linked to agreements between ministers and departmental chief executives—the departments agree to reach certain service levels, and government in turn agrees to provide extra resources. Th is approach offers a best practice model for interagency arrangements. Customs, since it is at the crossroads of trade, is ideally placed to act on behalf of other agencies with border management roles. National single windows for international trade are increasingly being established for this purpose. A national single window is generally described as providing: • A single point where all the data required by regulation to clear goods across a border can be lodged. • A single point where parties can be notified of a decision to release goods from border control. The national single window can take various forms, but most involve electronic links and messaging among government agencies and the trading community. A national single window will provide for the payment of duties, taxes, and any applicable fees and charges. The payments generally are to be made electronically to the accounts of the government agencies concerned. Care must be exercised in using the term single window. Some arrangements provide a single window for lodging documents at each border point.6 Others are comprehensive, enabling data to be