Your Country Needs You! For a New Policy of Public Service Attractiveness Targeting our Next Generations

Abstract

The neo-liberal era and its NPM-driven reforms being over, our polities confronted with terrible poly- crises and great transitions to handle, rediscover the importance of robust Neo-Weberian States and public administrations. Public employers are thus in great need of attracting the young talented people from the Z and Alpha Generations to join the Public Service. Alas, the public sector’s attractiveness in the eyes of youngsters has dropped in almost all European countries, for many reasons that are diagnosed in the article’s first section. This tricky situation calls for the setting up of a new, proactive public policy of attractiveness, whose target group, the undecided young people whose education does not predestine them to the public or the private sector, is identified in the next section. Then, a plea in favor of activating four pertinent levers of intrinsic motivation amongst these youngsters is presented in detail. The article concludes on the likely contribution of such an attractive policy to the overall objective of reconnecting (young) people with the State and the public institutions — a great need for our post-modern democracies.