ABSTRACT
The Thai civilian workforce consists of approximately 2 million personnel working in 19 ministries and 147 departments. The first act categorized civil service officials into three types: ordinary civil service, which is the career service recruited through an examination process and entitles personnel to a pension on retirement; special service, which are those who possess special skills that the government hire on non-fulltime basis; and government clerk. Permanent employees and temporary employees are civil service staff with non-official status and are mainly hired for supporting functions. The civil service is perceived as non-challenging, a slow and inflexible working system, and patron-client relationships. The civil service also seems to perform only moderately on the issue of good governance, which involves transparency and ethics. The Office of the Civil Service Commission has to make sure that the outcome of dealing with all functional challenges discussed earlier will help the civil service to become the employer of choice in Thailand’s labor market.
