New Delhi: Trainee officers of the IAS, IPS, IRS and other such services may have to undergo one more test immediately after they are recruited through the UPSC, ThePrint has learnt.
According to senior officials in the Department of Personnel and Training (DoPT), before the training of officers begins with the Common Foundation Course, all civil services recruits will be given pre-training material online, and they will be tested on it right before their Foundation Course begins.
“This will allow us to reorient the Foundation Course to have more focus on case studies, field and skill-based training,” a senior official said. “Most of the theoretical components of the FC will be completed before it begins.”
The recruits will be given access to “high-order training inputs” through the government’s online training platform iGoT.
“We assume that once these recruits have gone through the rigour of the UPSC, we can straight away expose them to high order training through iGoT, and ensure that once they come to the academy for the Foundation Course, their focus is on application-based training.”
Officials also said that recruits will be evaluated for the standardised test, and their performance will determine their intra-service seniority through their careers.
Another evaluation level to recruitment
While civil servants are assigned their services and cadre on the basis of their UPSC ranks, these ranks are not final in nature. Over the course of their two-year training post-recruitment, officers are evaluated several times in their Foundation Course and Professional Course, among others.
After these two years, their rank is finalised, and their intra-service seniority may change on the basis of these evaluations.
Now, the government is adding another level of evaluation to this process.
Last year, the Modi government made the Foundation Course mandatory for all civil servants.
While earlier the Foundation Course was mandatory for only seven civil services, in its bid to make the civil services more cohesive and less hierarchical, the government launched a Common Foundation Course last year.
Like the Common Foundation Course, the pre-training test will also be made compulsory for all the 20+ civil services in the country.
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