To successfully achieve the goals of the organization, it is essential to change the values, attitudes, and work capacities of the members, and it is education and training that is used as a method for this. It is very important to cultivate competent talent through education and training because it is difficult to select new talents, measure objective performance, and release unnecessary talent due to the characteristics of the public sector. As the local administrative environment changes, the capacity of the local public servants is increasingly emphasized, and especially, the importance of effective disaster management of the local autonoous governments has increased the necessity of strengthening the capacity of the disaster management officials of local governments, which can be accomplished through education and training. Thus, this study attempts to examine the effect of the capacity of civil servants in disaster management in relation to the characteristics of disaster management education and training programs and the effectiveness of education and training.
The research hypotheses set in this study are as follows. First, the characteristics of the disaster management education and training program and the sub?variables such as reality, diversity, educator characteristics, sustainability, and cooperation will directly affect the effectiveness of disaster management education and training. Second, the characteristics of the disaster management education and training program and the sub?variables such as reality, diversity, educator characteristics, sustainability, and cooperation will have a direct effect on the capacity of disaster management officials. Third, the capacity of disaster management officials and the sub?variables such as problem solving ability, interpersonal ability, resource management ability, and work ethics will have a direct effect on the effectiveness of disaster management education and training. Fourth, the characteristics of disaster management education and training program will have an indirect effect on the effectiveness of disaster management education and training through disaster management officer capacity and its sub?variables such as problem solving ability, interpersonal ability, resource management ability, and work ethic.
In this study, the characteristics of disaster management education and training program were set as independent variables. The characteristics of education and training programs are understood to include concepts of education contents and guidance in the mechanism of education design and delivery. In the previous studies, characteristics of education and training programs are classified into contents of education and training, methods of education and training, and educator’s characteristics of education and training. However, the characteristics of disaster management education and training programs need to be reorganized in terms of disaster management characteristics such as field, urgency, technical expertise, and joint participation. Therefore, the sub?variables of the characteristics of disaster management education and training program are classified as the reality of the relationship between the contents of education and training and the job, the diversity, which means the diversity of content and methods of education and training programs, the characteristics of the educator, which means the expertise of the educator''s qualities, level, motivation, and expertise, the duration and frequency of education and training, and the cooperation of practicing in organizing inter?organizational, interagency, and private cooperation.
The effectiveness of disaster management education and training, which is a dependent variable, means that the knowledge, skills and attitudes acquired through disaster management education and training are applied effectively in disaster management work. In this study, disaster management tasks are divided into activities required in the disaster management phases such as the phases of preventive?prepared?response?recovery.
The capacity of disaster management officers as a parameter is based on expert knowledge related to the job to carry out disaster management duties, and it is a capability acquired through accumulation of experiences and education and training for disaster management work. In this study, the disaster management competency that is based on the characteristics of competency and disaster management required for local government officials, which are presented in the previous studies, derived the ability of problem solving ability, interpersonal relationship, resource management ability, and work ethics as the disaster management competency of government officials. Problem solving ability refers to the ability to properly recognize and properly solve disasters through creative and logical thinking in the event of a problem, and to identify disaster characteristics and perform disaster management activities efficiently and promptly. Interpersonal competence is the ability to get along smoothly with people in contact with the job, and to achieve the common goal of disaster management, it is very important to create a cooperative atmosphere among participating organizations since disaster management requires cooperation of various organizations. Resource management ability is the ability to acquire and manage human and material resources and information, and securing and mobilizing resources in disaster management activities enables quick response and recovery of disasters. The work ethics is a capacity to act in accordance with the basic ethics of the public officer and act on the basis of it, and it is very important in that in the disaster management, a sense of mission is required, and service and responsibility consciousness make the disaster management activities efficient and strong resilience.
To verify the above research questions, this study conducted a questionnaire survey of 572 local government officials in 20 localities and conducted the analysis by the structural equation model(SEM). As a result of analyzing the fit of the structural model set for the hypothesis test, it was judged that all of them satisfied the reference value and were designed to be well designed to explain the data of the study.
The results of verifying the hypotheses set in this study are as follows. First, the influence of all paths on the hypothesis that the characteristics of disaster management education and training program and the sub?variables such as the reality, diversity, educator characteristics, sustainability, and cooperation will have a direct effect on the effectiveness of disaster management education and training was not found to be significant and the hypothesis was dismissed. This can be presumed to be due to the inevitable and passive attitude of the participants to the education because they do not have the necessity and motivation for the education and training.
Second, the hypothesis that the characteristics of disaster management education and training programs and the sub?variables such as the reality, diversity, educator characteristics, sustainability, and cooperation will have a direct effect on the capacity of disaster management officials was fully adopted. Disaster management education and training characteristics and the capacity of disaster management officials were found to have a statistically significant effect, and especially, the cooperative characteristic was found to have the greatest effect.
Third, the hypothesis that the capacity of disaster management officials and the sub?variables such as problem solving abilities, interpersonal abilities, resource management abilities, and work ethics have a direct effect on the effectiveness of disaster management education and training was all adopted. The capacity of disaster management officials and the effects of disaster management education and training were found to have a statistically significant effect, and especially, resource management ability was found to be the most influential.
Fourth, the path to the hypothesis on the characteristics of disaster management education and training program will indirectly affect the effectiveness of disaster management education and training through disaster management officer capacity and its subordinate variables such as problem solving ability, interpersonal ability, resource management ability, and work ethics was found to be all significant. To look at the results of the detailed decomposition of indirect effects of the sub?variables of the characteristics of disaster management education and training program and the sub?variables of disaster management officer capacity, most of the results showed that when the diversity, cooperativeness, sustainability, reality, and other characteristics of disaster management education and training programs, excluding the characteristics of educators, affect interpersonal relationship, problem solving, and resource management ability, the effectiveness of disaster management education and training was found to be higher. Therefore, to increase the effectiveness of disaster management education and training, it is necessary to primarily consider strategies to improve the interpersonal ability among disaster management officer capacities by constructing education and training programs in terms of characteristics such as diversity, cooperation, and sustainability.
The results of this study are contrary to many of those previous studies that education and training have a direct effect on the effectiveness of education and training. The results of this study provide suggestions that by examining the mediating effects of disaster management officer capacity on the relationship between the program characteristics of disaster management education and training and the effectiveness of disaster management education and training, it is possible to identify the characteristics of education and training programs that can improve the capacity of disaster management officials and improve the effectiveness of disaster management education and training. To improve the capacity of disaster management officers, the contents of education and training should be more realistic to be applied to the work field rather than the characteristics of educators. In addition, the contents and methods of education should be diversified, and education and training should be continuously operated periodically. Especially, characteristics of education and training programs should be structured to form cooperation system of other organizations, related institutions and private sector. These efforts may improve the capacity of disaster management officials and enhance the effectiveness of disaster management education and training.
The results of this study are meaningful in that this study can be used as basic data for development and application of education and training program characteristics for the improvement of disaster management officials capacity by preparing a theoretical frame to systemically understand the characteristics of disaster management education and training programs, the capacity of disaster management officials, and the effectiveness of disaster management education and training.