An old friend returns

The course was conducted by Dr Malcolm Bennison, an overseas consultant with 28 years experience in practicing and lecturing on human resource planning, who had previously assisted eight large commercial concerns in Hong Kong as well as the Civil Service Bureau and the Force itself. In 1995 he was an advisor to Personnel Wing on the initial design of the Personnel Communal Information System (PICS) and he ran a Manpower Planning course in 1999.

Dr Bennison was most impressed when he learned that PICS was now available Force-wide and used on a daily basis. He also praised Manpower Planning Section for the database they had built up over the last decade which, reproduced in the Force's Human Resource Management (HRM) Annual Report and accessible to all on POINT, provides the Force with a valuable strategic tool to analyse the past and suggest what the future holds in terms of recruitment, resignations/retirements, and promotion.

At the end of the course, Assistant Commissioner (Personnel) Mr Thomas Chan Wai-ki presented Dr Bennison with a souvenir and thanked him for his efforts. Also present, was Mr Peter Cornthwaite, largely responsible for the founding and setting-up of PICS and Mssrs Kim Adams and Chris Jones, the previous and current Superintendent Manpower Planning respectively. The general consensus among those attending was it had been a stimulating experience and provided them with an opportunity to discuss theory in the context of current HRM developments in the Force.

Dr Malcolm Bennison returns to run another course