Closing the Digital Skills Gap in Government: The UK’s Digital, Data, and Technology Professional Capability Framework
Authors: Arthi Vish, Digital, Data, and Technology Talent Consultant; Imara Salas, Master in Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School 2021
Governments around the world face a shortage of digital skills. It is generally assumed that some of the factors driving this gap are salary, career prospects, and cultural differences between the public and private sectors. To counter this trend, the United Kingdom implemented the Digital, Data, and Technology (DDaT) Professional Capability Framework, a template of standardized digital skills required across the civil service. This article traces the creation of the DDaT Framework as part of the UK government’s efforts to facilitate skills-matching and career development paths for civil servants with specialist digital delivery skills. Overall, the DDaT Framework can be seen as a stepping stone for attracting and developing DDaT capabilities in the public sector. Whether this approach can be replicated in other contexts, and the extent to which it can successfully reform public-sector culture, remains to be seen.
Why Can’t Governments Keep Up With the Private Sector in the Digital Space?
The gap in digital skills in the public sector is a widely documented phenomenon. In a recent study, McKinsey found a shortage of 8.6 million people across European governments with skills to successfully implement the European Union’s 2020 Digital Strategy. In the United States, a 2009 study by the Partnership for Public Service and Booz Allen Hamilton found that 41 percent of chief innovation officers (CIOs) and hiring managers said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with the number of qualified applicants for information security openings. While these figures might be outdated, there is no indication that the situation has improved in recent years, according to research by the RAND Corporation.
In many developed markets, the shortage of digital talent is traditionally attributed to non-competitive salaries in the public sector. Yet a study by Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs found no evidence of a pay gap between private- and public-sector employees in the United States. In fact, after accounting for non-wage benefits such as health care and pensions, the author found a public-sector compensation premium across the board — even in occupations like computer science, engineering, and design. In Europe, research by the Institute of Labor Economics also refutes the notion of a pay gap for skilled workers in the public sector when looking at the lifetime value of a career in either sector, a metric that considers the value provided by increased stability in civil-service careers.
What, then, drives this talent shortage? A growing body of evidence points to public-sector culture. By definition, governments are bureaucratic institutions that rely on public support and are accountable to taxpayers. As a result, the adoption of agile and iterative processes is hindered by the rigidity of public procurement frameworks and attitudes, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). This might discourage individuals with digital skills from pursuing careers in civil service, instead opting for private-sector jobs that are more conducive to creativity and innovation. The Belfer Center study also found that government workers report less independence, responsibility, and ownership over their work, as well as weaker collaboration and trust among peers and managers, than their private-sector counterparts.
Another factor is the relative lack of opportunities for career advancement for public-sector workers in the digital space. At a time when digital technologies are continually evolving, governments don’t always recognize the value of ongoing learning and reinvention, deterring skilled professionals from entering the public sector in the first place or driving them to leave prematurely. A 2015 study by the UK’s National Audit Office found that most of the (few) data and technology leaders in the Civil Service had been in their position for less than two years (though retention rates are a larger issue, as some departments lose 20 to 25 percent of their staff every year, costing the country £36 to £74 million in recruitment, training, and lost productivity). In its key recommendations for strengthening digital government, the OECD highlights developing digital skills, creating career paths, and providing training programs for civil servants as priority items.
Governments have tried to address this gap by setting up digital service groups to respond to complex governmental and societal changes by improving the delivery of digital services. According to a 2019 study by Ines Mergel, most of these groups have emerged as a third space of IT governance — located between centralized and decentralized CIO offices — and tend to be led by private-sector executives. While digital service groups provide an attractive opportunity for those traditionally deterred from public-sector jobs, they also risk absorbing an already limited pool of people. Instead of distributing much-needed digital talent across the board, digital service groups can concentrate talent if they are not deliberate in their efforts to attract talent to other departments or agencies.
Overall, several factors may be driving the shortage of digital skills in the public sector. Lower salaries, stagnant cultures, professional dead ends, and the mere concentration of skills in one sector of government could explain the differential across public- and private-sector institutions. The extent to which each of these variables impacts the recruitment and development of digital skills certainly varies by cultural context and income level, but none should be overlooked when it comes to designing and rolling out strategies to narrow the gap. The next section of this article traces the UK government’s effort to help the Civil Service reform its hiring practices to attain and retain the digital skills it needs to overcome present and future challenges.
Standardizing Hiring Practices to Meet Digital Demands in the Public Sector
In 2012, the UK government rolled out the Digital, Data, and Technology (DDaT) Professional Capability Framework, a template that standardizes job descriptions across departments and provides career development and pay progression opportunities across the board. By 2020, the share of civil servants employed in DDaT increased from 1.2 to 3.2 percent (as a reference, tax and human resources professions represent 4.7 and 2.1 percent of the Civil Service head count, respectively). Moreover, while the Civil Service shrank by more than 100,000 people over the past decade, the total number of civil servants in digital roles has doubled — from 6,350 civil servants employed in the profession known as IT in 2010 to 13,660 DDaT employees in 2020.
History and goals
The Government Digital Service (GDS) was launched in 2011 to lead the UK government’s digital transformation. GDS assists other departments in their digital transformation processes, building platforms, standards, and digital services based on a set of user-centric design principles. Early on, the service struggled to recruit and retain capable talent, realizing that many Civil Service roles did not fit into the digital era. Even as a digital service group, GDS struggled to promote its roles in the external labor market without being seen as an old-fashioned public-sector employer. Other departments also had this public image — sometimes unfairly, but many times rightfully.
As an insider with an outsider perspective, GDS realized the Civil Service needed a cross-government taxonomy of roles and job descriptions that aligned with the external job market. That is how the DDaT Capability Framework came about: a standardized terminology of functions to be adopted by departments undergoing digital transformation. Between 2012 and 2015, the Capability Framework included simple vital roles that the Civil Service struggled to hire — such as software engineers, developers, and technical architects — though it has continuously evolved since.
Design
To attract and retain digital talent in the Civil Service, GDS set out to accomplish four goals that would strengthen the DDaT framework: (1) define a common taxonomy of jobs, (2) establish a recruitment strategy, (3) promote workforce planning and training, and (4) offer compensation aligned with the market. In the process of co-creating a common taxonomy of jobs, the service worked with other departments to define job titles, status, responsibilities, and levels of expertise.
As of 2020, the DDaT Profession Capability Framework is composed of six job families: data, IT operations, product and delivery, quality assurance testing, technical, and user-centered design. Each job family includes several roles specific to that family (see Figure 3.5). For example, the user-centered design family contains roles like content strategist and graphic designer, whereas the product and delivery family includes business analyst and product manager roles. Each job role is then broken down into different levels of seniority associated with a corresponding skill level: awareness, working, practitioner, and expert.
Figure 3.5: DDaT Job Families and Roles
Implementation and requirements
Since its creation, the Capability Framework has been implemented following an agile approach. In an ever-changing market, job families and roles constantly evolve based on information gathered from other departments and market research. In addition, the framework is complemented by Success Profiles, a new Civil Service recruitment model that assesses candidates based on abilities, technical expertise, behaviors, strengths, and experience. These two frameworks operate together to find suitable candidates for digital roles across the UK Civil Service.
In a highly competitive market for digital skills, the Capability Framework levels the Civil Service playing field. Every time a department has a DDaT job opening, GDS coordinates with the hiring manager to ensure that the role fits one of the profiles. But the framework also gives the departments some leeway based on their projects and requirements. As a rule of thumb, 80 percent of the role description should be inspired by the framework, and 20 percent by department specifications. This allows all departments to attract a standard cross-section of candidates and keeps big services from absorbing all the talent.
Given the centralized nature of the Civil Service, the DDaT Framework has been rolled out evenly across the UK — i.e., once a department decides to adopt it, it applies across all UK locations. Yet this process has not been without challenges. Like any framework, it requires a lot of change management, which is quite slow in government. Initially, many departments were hesitant to adopt the framework because it meant a massive transformation of their hiring processes. For human resources teams — which had spent decades defining payroll schemes and job descriptions — this erased much of their work and demanded a whole new set of tasks. This reaction happened across the board, in departments that were years into their digital transformation and in those that hadn’t even considered starting the journey.
Getting some pushback forced GDS to showcase the DDaT Framework’s value to achieve the critical mass it needed to thrive. During the first two years of implementation, the team created metrics to show how the framework allowed departments to attract a more capable and diverse pool of talent. Once they hired someone, moreover, the departments found that retention rates increased because people were appropriately placed based on their skills, saw opportunities to rise through the ranks, and were compensated relatively in line with the market. After a couple of years, it became clear that departments that did not adopt the framework would be competing for the same people at a disadvantage, and the uptake increased even more.
Can This Model Be Replicated?
That the DDaT Framework succeeded in the UK is no coincidence: There was a set of conditions already in place that allowed the concept to come into operation in a short time. First, the Civil Service had created GDS years earlier, establishing a solid base of individuals pushing for digital transformation in government. Second, the Capability Framework had buy-in at the highest levels — supported by the minister of digital and creative industries and the digital secretary. Third, GDS was not set up on a shoestring budget, having been granted millions of pounds to set up the DDaT Profession as a centralized unit.
There are few countries, even in the developed world, that can replicate these circumstances. Without an established digital service group, leadership buy-in, and financial resources, it is unlikely that a project of this magnitude would break the barriers that stood in the way of the DDaT Framework. Because of the number of stakeholders involved and the demands it imposed on departments across the country, it is hard to imagine the success of this project without at least the first two conditions being in place. Whether a lack of resources could be mitigated by operational capacity and buy-in could vary from country to country.
According to the OECD’s Observatory of Public Sector Innovation, public procurement is in desperate need of reform to embrace the tools, techniques, and culture of the digital age. In this regard, GDS is leading the Global Digital Marketplace, a partnership with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office that aims to help other governments boost their DDaT spaces. The project moved into alpha testing in 2020, working with the governments of Colombia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mexico, and South Africa to, among other things, build internal capabilities and develop new professions via models that mirror the DDaT Framework. Whatever the outcomes, this process will undoubtedly produce lessons on how to navigate these challenges in emerging markets.
Do Standardized Hiring Practices Attract Digital Talent to the Public Sector?
To a certain extent, the DDaT Professional Capability Framework successfully adopted better practices that facilitated the recruitment of a digital workforce in government. Not only has the UK’s civil sector managed to attract more digital talent in a period of austerity, DDaT salaries are also consistently above the median and show less variation than those of other professions in the public sector. Moreover, the framework seems effective at providing career advancement opportunities within the Civil Service and reducing attrition — though turnover data is difficult to assess. Significantly, this development hasn’t been absorbed by GDS, which only employs one out of every 14 DDaT experts in the Civil Service.
Whether the DDaT Framework has resulted in a cultural change that fosters creativity and innovation is still unclear. Culture is both sticky and difficult to measure; hence, even if substantial changes emerge from this initiative, these probably won’t be reflected in tangible short-term outcomes. Likewise, it remains to be seen how applicable this approach is to other contexts with less buy-in, scarcer resources, and weaker digital capabilities. Even so, thanks to the Global Digital Marketplace, there is an opportunity to draw critical lessons as the DDaT Framework gets tested in the field.
The role of the public sector in the digital era is constantly evolving. Yet governments will never be able to compete with Google or Amazon — nor should they strive to do so. Governments supply essential services that should be effective, efficient, and reliable. Most of the time, they should be dependable, not innovative. From a reliability and efficiency standpoint, however, governments should undoubtedly be faster followers. If initiatives like the DDaT Framework help the public sector move in this direction, governments should explore them.
