0
A CAREER in Pakistan’s civil service still begins with a posting order — a single piece of paper that will dictate a life of movement, mediocrity and managed expectations. Behind that piece of paper is the Establishment Division: the guardian of bureaucratic continuity and, paradoxically, its greatest blind spot. Those who run it come from diverse backgrounds, having passed the CSS exam, but hardly anyone is an expert in human resource management.
A recent presentation to the PM by Planning Minister Ahsan Iqbal was perhaps the first time that someone tasked with civil service reform shed light on the role — or lack of it — of the Establishment Division in shaping the careers of civil servants.
The current Establishment Division is the command centre of an outdated model where seniority trumps skill, secrecy masks incompetence, and process matters more than output. There is no real distinction between an officer who excels and one who merely occupies space; both are processed through the same promotion boards, attend the same trainings and collect the same medals.
The Establishment Division is run by civil servants with little experience of human resource management. They seem to have no insight into officers’ actual abilities; neither do they have a system to provide such insights. The system knows where they are posted, when they joined, when they are due for promotion, and retirement. But it doesn’t know if they’re good at team management, understand digital governance, or have ever designed a policy that worked. It knows ranks; it does not know people. This is not human resource management. This is logistics disguised as administration.
The state must reimagine what it expects from civil servants.
What it needs to become, urgently, is a proper human resource (HR) department: equipped with modern tools, structured along corporate lines, and focused not on paperwork but performance. The idea is not merely about digitisation or dashboards but reimagining what the state expects from its civil servants and how it builds a system that nurtures, assesses, and grows them.
In the corporate world, HR departments are responsible for setting clear targets, measuring individual performance and aligning employee goals with organisational strategy, and, most of all, acting in a timely manner. The Establishment Division, by contrast, relies on the performance evaluation report, which is often written hastily, filled with diplomatic phrases, bears no relation to the officer’s actual contribution, and lacks the virtue of timelines. The officers have often moved on by the time PERs are finalised.
An HR-focused Establishment Division would replace the PER with strong feedback mechanisms: input from peers, subordinates, seniors, and, in relevant cases, the public. Project-based evaluations would track what officers actually delivered, not where they were posted.
Performance-based incentives — foreign trainings, premium postings, bonus allowances and even continuation of service — should follow from this system. Without a credible mechanism of reward and consequence, the civil service will continue to reward longevity instead of leadership. Right now, trainings are episodic, generic and mostly ceremonial. Officers attend the same courses regardless of their actual needs, career stage, or professional gaps. There is no individualised plan.
In a modern HR system, every officer would have a dynamic career development file: listing courses taken, skills acquired, feedback received, and areas for growth. Targeted upskilling in areas like financial modelling, digital transformation, urban planning, or negotiation would be available through both local and global platforms. Noth-ing about this roadmap would be confidential. When you are not confident about your assessment, the reports are often mar-ked ‘confidential’ to avoid scrutiny or ques-tioning.
The Establishment Division should partner with global institutions to offer certified learning paths, and fast-track officers who show initiative. Officers with outdated skills shouldn’t be promoted merely because of age or tenure. Corporate HR departments invest in leadership pipelines. Governments should do the same. Grooming 10-12 future federal secretaries should be as deliberate a task as drafting the budget, and these individuals should come from all service groups without any favouritism.
Lastly, before attempting a major upheaval in the name of civil service reform — which is likely to face delaying tactics — the Planning Division can attempt a meaningful shakeup in the Establishment Division. This could be done by bringing in HR professionals from the corporate sector and purging the Establishment Division from civil servants whose generic backgrounds, group biases, and resistance to change have held back reform.
The writer is a former civil servant.
X: @SyedSaadat5
Published in Dawn, August 11th, 2025
