Hiring and keeping good people: 6 things government must do
Another well-informed person publicly called out the lack of digital skills working in government this week. Yvonne Gallagher, the NAO’s Director of Digital Value for Money, concluded that:
Digital skills — whatever they are—aren’t good enough, plentiful enough or being directed in the right way.
As far as I can see, nobody in Whitehall disagrees with this. The charge, in various guises, has been laid at the Civil Service’s door for four years. It was in the Civil Service Reform Plan.
One problem is that not enough people are clear about what digital skills are. The words are now sprinkled across strategy documents and departmental plans with abandon. I’m no expert, but I’ll bet the same could be said of commercial skills too, another noted weak spot.
Depending on where you look, digital capability might mean one of four things. The ability to use a computer. The ability to tweet. The ability to do something requiring specific deep knowledge, like technical architecture, user research or front-end design. Or the ability to see how digital technology enables the transformation of an organisation to focus on user needs, and make that change happen.
Forget about the first two. For one, they’re cheap. Most 10-year olds could help you there.
The second pair is more problematic. Growing demand is now meeting finite supply, and there’s only one path from there. But basic economics also gives a hint as to what the right answer for struggling organisations might be, and what wrong answers they may easily end up choosing.
The obvious wrong answer is to kill off internal demand for digital skills. Give up. Wait for this to blow over. Play tactically, not strategically.
A more subtle wrong answer is to ignore the economics and characterise it as a short-term problem that’s fixable by hiring consultants. I’m a freelance consultant, so I’m clearly not going to say this is a bad option, in moderation. But I’m also a taxpayer. Digital disruption is not going to go away. Fly-by-nights like me cannot fill a structural, long-term skills gap.
So the best answer is to fix the supply side. Create more of these skills, more digital doers and thinkers. To give themselves a chance, there are six things the Civil Service must do.
- Hire the best
On a very good day, the Civil Service can be far more able than any major company. It should demand the very best from around the country, and drop the learned helplessness that is clung on to at disappointingly senior levels.
There are two benefits to doing so. Get the best people, and hundreds will learn directly from them. Even better, digital has an amazing herd mentality. People follow the best around, like a dog would a pork scratching. Get the best, and talented friends will follow.
2. Find the believers
The Civil Service has hundreds, if not thousands, of smart people who are deeply fed up and longing for change. Fed up with management, their day-to-day slog, their thwarted efforts to improve things. For some of those, the digital agenda has provided a chink of light, a sense that someone is finally listening to the things they’ve been saying for years.
Fired-up newcomers ignore these experienced hands at their peril. They know where the bodies are buried. They will save you months of wasted effort.
Find those who want to learn and work in a different way. Give them lots of space to do so.
3. Make it more than just another job
The Civil Service has an unwritten trajectory to reaching the senior ranks — Faststream, a stint in Treasury, No.10 or Cabinet Office, some time in Private Office, maybe a Bill team. Digital jobs remain, for the most part, well outside that gilded path.
The Digital and Technology Fast Stream is a good step towards addressing this. But digital teams in departments need to become the career equivalent of Private Offices or Strategy Units. They need to offer 2 years of hard, rewarding work, lots of connections, lots of kudos. Exceptionalism without arrogance for ambitious people.
4. Make it possible
Government offers an opportunity to work on fascinating, unique and complex problems every single day. This is the ace card. Many designers and coders in companies have to work on fixing up pop-up ads.
Unfortunately, time and again, people who join to change public services are forced to spend all their time arguing about the need to change those services. They run out of time to do any of the actual changing. They become tired and frustrated. And then they leave. Stop misleading them.
5. Learn by doing
When the Civil Service has come up against supply side problems in the past — management skills, for example — it defaults to thinking a couple of online training courses and some light mentoring will do the job. It doesn’t.
There’s no doubt training must play a big role. In a survey last month, 44% said that a lack of digital training for staff was impeding the move towards digital public services. But at least part of that must be learning by doing. If you’ve just got a certificate for digital, you haven’t been trained.
6. End the civil servant pay gap
No-one joins the Civil Service for the money, but people do leave because of it. It does not seem fair that people doing the same jobs as permanent staff can receive half of a contractor’s salary. Yes, there’s security and pensions. But there’s also the horror of performance reviews.
Other specialists working in government quietly get salary top-ups — geologists, librarians, oil technicians. So should those with digital skills.
What else? Answers on a tweet to @ad_greenway
(Edits with thanks to @hannahknight89, @annashipman and @cjforms)
