2020 Learning Bootcamp: How to be digital as a public servant
Editor’s Note: Nikki Alabi and Michael Kehinde, PhD are both Senior Policy Advisors at the Ontario Digital Service and part of the team re-imagining digital service training across the Ontario Public Service.
The Ontario Digital Service and Apolitical teamed up to offer a free, new online course that helps public servants, at any level of government in Canada, to apply digital-era principles and practices to their work. Learn how the course got started and how to sign up.
If you are…
- A public servant working in Canada (from any level of government)
- A student or employee of an academic institution in Canada
- Interested in learning how to adopt the skills, practices and mindsets of the digital era into your daily work
This boot camp is for you!
Register for free today
About the boot camp
We curated and packaged the most relevant hands-on activities, case studies, videos and reading lists into short lessons. Each lesson is designed to take 10 minutes or less to do. In total, the program offers 10 lessons.
The bootcamp covers:
- How to apply the culture and values of digital workplaces
- The top trends driving digital transformation worldwide
- Best practices for working better — like Agile, human-centred design and Lean.
After you register, you will get lessons emailed to you over a 10-week period when the course begins in January 2020. Throughout the course, you’ll also have the opportunity to engage in webinars and discussions with other learners across the country.
Bonus: After you’ve completed the course, you’ll earn a certificate of completion from Apolitical.
What we mean by digital government
While we help teams build skills to design digital services that meet user needs through steps set out in the Digital Service Standard, we also nurture the behaviours and mindsets associated with digital workplaces.
This new way of thinking applies to everyone in government — policy, operations, administration, leadership, and so on — not only teams building digital services. That’s because we are all living in the quickly evolving digital and data-driven world around us.
Digital can mean many things to different people, but Janet Hughes says it best:
Digital isn’t a list of things to do. It’s about how you think, how you behave, what you value, and what drives decisions in your organization.
Regardless of what province, region or municipality in Canada you work in, the first step towards digital transformation is embodying a digital mindset.
What we mean by a digital mindset:
- Entering projects with an ethos of openness and collaboration. This mentality can transcend boundaries and link all Canadian public servants.
- Being hyper-focused on human needs and finding ways to test ideas, early, often, and most importantly with users.
Since a digital mindset transcends boundaries, we got to thinking, what’s the rest of Canada up to and what would it look like if we collaborated with other provinces working through their digital journey, just like us?
Partnering with Apolitical
I first learned about Apolitical about a year ago from a post on Yammer, an internal tool that connects public servants across the Ontario Public Service.
Michael and I worked through two of their courses offered this summer, including:
By working through the courses remotely, together, we were able to challenge one another’s thinking, and find connections to our ongoing work with the digital training team.
We brought our learning to the team, one day, and it sparked the idea to reach out to Apolitical to see if we could bring this way of learning into the Ontario Public Service.
Why Apolitical?
The team at Apolitical is on a mission to bring 21st century learning into government. As a global platform for public servants, they offer a range of learning products aimed at improving how government works. Many of their offerings are provided at no cost to the learner.
The organization is also open to working together on developing course materials, and we saw a great opportunity to bring our in-house training package to a wider audience through this platform. That’s why we paired up with Apolitical to launch this first-of-its-kind online course on digital government.
The co-design process
We approached the development of this course collaboratively. We made connections with public service teams working at the intersection of learning and digital, across Canada, to pull together a curriculum that would enable multiple jurisdictions to share the challenges and opportunities they face on their respective digital government journeys.
We listened to questions and themes that emerged from our leadership in the digital age series, integrated lessons learned from our ongoing training sessions, and folded in feedback from colleagues and other government partners through an open, co-creation drafting process online.
Working with governments across Canada
So far, we’ve partnered with the Federal Government of Canada, the governments of Alberta, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, and Yukon.
This has been important for us as we create a course that draws a pan-Canadian picture of what government transformation looks like, and the learning support needed to enable great public service teams in the digital era.
A level playing field by design
For distributed workers like myself, this course provides all Canadians an equal chance to learn. You can participate and contribute — from where you are. There’s no need to travel to a specific place, or in-person location.
It goes back to our commitment on digital inclusion, and one way to provide a space for all Canadians to come together is to provide forums for all Canadians to learn together.
