I am passionate and proud to be involved in the PPMA and the public sector and I look forward to leading debate and shaping the public services workforce agenda in 2015/16.

At our seminar – which has a theme of ‘Our past, our present and our future’ – we celebrated 40 years of PPMA and SOCPO, looking back at what has influenced us all to the present day. Now we will be looking forward to the next 40 years of HR, people management and organisational development (OD), in the local, regional, central government arena – in fact across all public services.

Some would say that it’s been a journey of evolution for HR/OD as a profession and many would argue we have been reactors to circumstance, and this has shaped our role and determined how we are perceived as either value adding business partners or still showing too many signs of our compliance, policy policing characteristics from the 1960’s when these issues seemed to dominate.