30.08.2018.
Minister Vulin: Care for people in our system
Minister of Defence Aleksandar Vulin has attended today the opening ceremony of the Seminar on the work of the Personnel Service of the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces, which is held at the Guards Club at Topčider within the celebration of the Personnel Service Day.
Congratulating on the day of the service, Minister Vulin pointed out that it was said long ago that there is no policy without personnel policy and that this is actually the only policy.
- What selection of people you make, what kind of virtues and what kind of behaviours you reward and seek, such results shall you have. Personnel policy is everything and do not forget that you are part of the Human Resources Department, working with people, and that is the hardest and most beautiful part of any job. In the decades behind us we have forgotten or very often forget, that we are working with people, that these are not only numbers, and that management of their careers is not only fulfilling the fixed rules in which all the wisdom of this world is collected and which cannot be changed because we adopted them. We often forget that in all these papers there is a man who needs to be taken care of and taken account of. He needs to be offered hand when he is wrong, got straightened when he stumbles, to be given a second chance – Minister Vulin said, adding that we often forget that a professional soldier who is now in the barracks did not cease to be a man just because he became a professional.
He added: we always have to sense when a person has hard times, regardless of whether it is a short-term volunteer, a professional soldier, a non-commissioned officer or an officer.
- That is why you exist. You are not only to manage careers of the personnel, to make sure that all the rules set forth in the rulebooks and laws are complied with, which is an important, perhaps crucial part of your everyday work, but you also have to feel the need to be with the person who may suffer. Tomorrow, this man will be with you in the same trench, on a task in which life may be lost and the state is to be guarded, and you must know who you are going with, as he must know that as well. Do not ever forget that apart from taking care of personnel, you also have to take care about people. And that is the most valuable thing our army has, human resources. Our army is neither the richest nor the most modern one, our assets, weapons and tools are neither among the best nor the most modern ones, and we could say that there are armies that are better and more advanced than that of ours, but our people must be the best – the minister of defence said and added that only for that there can be no justification.
Minister Vulin added that it is exactly for this reason that we need to take care of people the most.
- For this you do not need money or a powerful banking machine; for this you do not need either political support or an order from the minister and the generals, that is what you have committed to by doing your job – to care for people and produce the best possible personnel. This is what you have been given to improve and make them even better. This is in order to re-establish the system that takes care of a member of the Serbian Armed Forces, from the first day to the retirement, and beyond. And they must know that they are taken care of and thought about and that they are to do their best to serve their army and their people, and it is up to us to do everything else – Minister Aleksandar Vulin said, and told the participants of the seminar that he also wishes them, when they return to their jobs, to take with them awareness and the sense that we are re-establishing a system that has been demolished in a planned and deliberate manner, to destroy our army, that people are our army to be taken care of, and that the results also depend on this care.
The participants in the seminar were greeted by the state secretary in the Ministry of Defence, Aleksandar Živković, who, after wishing them happy work, spoke about the current moment in the personnel service and the most important issues that should be paid attention to in the period to come.
The work of the seminar was managed by Brigadier General Mile Jelić, Chief of the Personnel Department, who spoke about the work of the personnel service and the main tasks in the management of human resources in the following period.
Among the numerous topics, they spoke about the filling in of assigned positions in the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces through the open competition, on the novelties in normative solutions in the field of military education, as well as on the regulation of length of service of the insured for former professional members and on the normative activity of the Personnel Department.
In the field of psychological activities, which has been one of the tasks within the personnel management function since the last year, amendments and supplements to the expert methodological instructions for psychological selection in the Ministry of Defence and the Serbian Armed Forces have been made.
Addressing the current topics at today's seminar has been intended for the purpose of giving a common contribution to the construction of a more efficient and modern philosophy of human resources management in the defence system.
