The maintenance of aviation safety depends upon people, Namibian Prime Minister's Office Cabinet Secretary Dr George Simataa told the AVI Afrique Innovation Summit 2018 in Pretoria on Wednesday. "People are the most important assets in your organisations," he stressed. "People, and not technology or products, are key to organizational success."

Aviation safety required the recruitment of the correctly skilled people into aviation safety organisations. However, recruiting such people was not easy. Prioritisation was required.

Even in aviation safety institutions, there were some positions that were more important than others, he pointed out. The first step was to identify these key positions -- those positions which, if not filled, would render the organisation unable to fulfill its mission.

Once these strategic posts had been identified, or created, the next step was to attract, select and recruit the right people to occupy them. He cautioned that identifying people who were good at such jobs -- such as aviation safety inspector --  was not the same as identifying people who had the right formal qualifications for them. He drily observed that it was known that there were fully qualified but bad doctors and engineers. You did not merely need properly qualified aviation safety inspectors, you needed good ones.

Given the quality and skills of the people you were seeking to recruit, the recruitment process had to be a fast moving one, making full use of modern technologies, including social media. Old-fashioned, slow-moving recruitment processes, stretching over many weeks, would just alienate the very people you were trying to attract. "These people don't have time to waste," he warned. Interviews should be conducted by skilled interviewers, not by line managers with little interviewing experience. Good safety inspectors where not necessarily good speakers: "these people are doers, not sayers," he noted.

Having recruited the right people, you had to retain them. Skilled staff had to be taken seriously and treated with respect. They should not be expected to 'keep in their place' and not disturb senior management. Not only did they require decent salaries and employment conditions, they required the proper facilities, systems and equipment to do their work. "You need to spend money because it is the only way to keep your people," stressed Simataa.

But getting your organisation properly staffed was only the beginning. From the start, you had also to think about who would, one day, replace them. Succession planning was key. But before you could engage in succession planning, he observed, you had to have the people who would succeed. Junior personnel who could and would be trained and developed so that one day they could replace their seniors.

There was no "golden plan" that organisations could follow to achieve the desired results. There were merely guidelines, such as those he had outlined. "What works for one organisation does not work for another."