Continuous professionalization of the quality of the services provided to the community by the public security institutions has been propelled by the application of practices and principles from human resources and management of people at work. Such practices refer to the definition of duties and responsibilities of a post in accord with the competency profile required for the performance of the post. Important sources of input to the referred practices regard the application of professional profiling and of competency mapping to the reality of the public security institutions, vital to the planning of personnel development actions and to the quest for competent performance. The present work aims at discussing issues of methodological nature and the practical implications deriving from the application of these tools, namely, professional profiling and competency mapping, in law enforcement institutions, indicating the limits and the possibilities in the context of public security. The bibliographic study of the main national administration and psychology periodicals was conducted with the view of proposing a method for competency and professional profile mapping and its critical analysis in terms of applicability within the reality of the organizations, based on the analysis of the publications on the theme. Possibilities are presented herein for the acting in the context of public security, integrating the techniques of professional profile mapping.
Job analysis; Professional competence; Public security; Human resources administration