How to identify skills gaps in government – and close them

Photo by Greg Plominski via Pixabay

Public and private sector experts from around the world share how they’re reimagining skills development and recruitment processes to enable greater agility in government  

Governments need digitally-savvy public servants to deliver better citizen-focused services, and to help leaders and managers cultivate risk-smart and innovative organisations.

Meeting competency gaps and talent challenges is key to ensuring governments have the right skills mix. But clunky processes can stifle recruitment, while training programmes based on limited analysis can prove ineffective.

At a Global Government Forum webinar, supported by Skillsoft, public and private sector experts from Belgium, Canada, South Africa and the US discussed how to identify the key competencies governments need, how to build the digital skills civil servants need now and for the future – and how to assess the impact of talent programmes.

Analysing skills needs in Belgium

Peter Vandenbruaene, general advisor and manager of key skills development in the Belgium government’s federal public service, kicked off the webinar by explaining how the Belgian government goes about understanding its skills needs.

He explained that it follows the ADDIE framework, which encompasses analysis, design, development, implementation and evaluation in its training initiatives.

Analysis, he said, is the most important of these five phases. “We find that often we’re spending a lot of money and time on training in our federal public service, and when people go back to their offices, nothing changes… probably because the [skills] needs have not been very well identified or analysed,” he explained.

To address this, the Belgian government follows a four-step approach to developing its online and in-person training programmes comprising strategic input, employee input, evidence gleaned from data, and benchmarking.

First, information is collected from strategic management plans and from the most senior civil servants in each ministry to assess what the government sees as its most important objectives for the future so that skills that link to these strategic goals can be identified.  

Read more: Research identifies top skills that support innovation in government

The next step is to work with civil servants including managers to understand their individual and team needs. Here, Vandenbruaene’s team make use of the Kirkpatrick Model.

This involves asking civil servants what the problem or challenge they’re facing is and considering how the problem translates to things that are observable in the workplace and whether or not these are linked to skills and knowledge, or other factors such as procedures or software issues.  

Only if they determine the problem can be solved by skills development do they start putting together training packages that can reduce or remove competency deficits.  

Then comes the data, in line with Vandenbruaene’s aim for skills development to be as “evidence based as possible”.

“We have data scientists in our organisation who monitor different procedures, from participation in previous courses to how popular certain courses are, to the number of times we’ve been able to register or launch a course,” he explained.   

The fourth and final part of the puzzle is benchmarking, through learning from different countries, which can help to pick up on future skills gaps or those which civil servants may not yet be consciously aware of.

“It’s through this international benchmarking that we identify skills that maybe we were prone to missing,” Vandenbruaene said.

Read more: UK government to boost civil service AI skills in latest One Big Thing campaign

Government of Canada: from stability to agility

Lauren Hunter is director of talent policy and platforms in the digital talent and leadership sector of the Office of the Chief Information Officer of Canada.

She described a problems within the Government of Canada that can slow down recruitment, which include different authorities for the classification of jobs within the public sector, is different from the Public Service Commission, which posts job adverts and oversees the whole system.

“The data and the intelligence about who needs what and who’s doing what is very often not transferred between these systems,” she said. “We have these silos with very high walls between them, and despite best efforts to collaborate, very often you’d end up with a fractured ecosystem that led to undesirable outcomes – like it taking 250 days to fill a position in the digital and tech space,” Hunter explained.  

“We had a very high dependency on contractors to come in and fill the gaps, because digital and tech just can’t wait.”

She described the government’s traditional methodology for creating a public service position as based on “stability and structure in an era where what we actually see on the ground is the need for agility and data”.

As such, the government has been working over the last eight years to “reimagine this model” for the digital and tech roles specifically, with input from chef information officers and a big focus on data.

“What we’ve been trying to build is this concept of a central brain,” Hunter said. “It’s not recruitment over here and learning and development over here and career mobility over here – it’s a sort of central arc where we’re imagining a human being who is an applicant, who becomes an employee, who goes on a learning journey, who may move to another department, who then gets promoted.”

As such, new infrastructure has been built to pull all the strands together so employees can use the same platform, from initial recruitment, to upskilling, to moving departments and more.  

An employee might use the platform to apply for funding to undertake formal training. When they complete the training, it’s added to their profile on the system, and they may qualify for a talent pool in another part of government. A manager can then use the same platform to search for the people who have the skills they require to fill a role.

“Instead of a bunch of siloes, it’s a model where everything comes into the central brain, and what you need is drawn out of the central brain, and in the process, people are treated more holistically than having to manage each separate part of their path in a very fractured way,” Hunter said.

She emphasised that skills taxonomy is not fixed and that it will be continuously evolving but that the Canadian government is moving towards “central guideposts and central currency of understanding, paired with a lot of flexibility and agility for people to right size to whatever their need is in real time”.

She added: “The focus really is on accelerating the speed and the efficiency of the system overall”.

Read more: US Office of Personnel Management sets out federal workforce reforms to build ‘high-performance culture’

Re-enforcing the legitimacy of the state in South Africa

Nyiko Mabunda, chief director in the Office of the Director-General of the Department of Public Service and Administration in South Africa, described the context in the country, where a high proportion of public servants are over the age of 55.

As such, there is a need for continuous learning and reskilling and, crucially, a move towards recruitment and skills development linked tightly to departmental goals and service delivery – all based on improvements in data, analysis, management and governance.

The important of such work cannot be overstated in the country, as Mabunda explained: “We need to understand that if we are not effective, we’re not efficient, and we’re not assertive in how we plan and deliver services, then we are moving away from the strategic nature that government is supposed to play” with people who can afford to beginning to use private rather than public services. “It’s an issue of legitimacy of the state.”

The government is therefore working on a new human capital strategy and performance management reforms that link an individual’s performance to that of the institution, and their skills, competencies and qualifications to what is required for effective delivery.

There is also a focus on the “bureaucratic capacity to set targets and be able to achieve them”, and on assessing and measuring state capacity against productivity – particularly outputs and outcomes in areas such as health and education, he said.

Read more: Boosting skills to drive public service reform in South Africa and Ghana

A private sector perspective on prioritisation – and leveraging AI to track behaviour change

Mark Onisk, chief content officer of the webinar’s knowledge partner Skillsoft, expanded on the topic of connecting skills to strategic goals as described by both Mabunda and Vandenbruaene. As he highlighted, assessing what skills are needed in government – and indeed any organisation – is principally a “prioritisation exercise”.

“You have to be very thoughtful across all skills, whether it’s technology leadership, professional effectiveness, health and safety compliance, regulatory skills, to not try to boil the ocean and to be very focused,” he said.

Skillsoft advise their clients to look at skills as a function of what’s in their annual operating plan. “What’s in the plan for this year? What do you need to get done? What are the wildly important goals and initiatives? And then what does that look like on a longer term basis – how does it correlate to your strategy?”

Such an exercise can help to identify the top skills that government needs, and then begin to correlate to the roles it has in its workforce.

“Identifying what those key and target skills are… is the first step on the pathway to measurement,” he said.

The next step for Sillsoft is to help their clients “curate” benchmarks against the target skills that have been defined. This can be done through “nano assessments” – the company has around 900 of these that each take five to seven minutes to complete – which organisations can use to tie benchmarks and analytics to their skills taxonomies, for example.  

The next level is to assess how any associated programme changes behaviour within an organisation and what the impact is in terms of efficiency and “the bottom line of service delivery”. 

Behaviour change has been a “very challenging thing to try to measure using heritage technology because you’d have to run control groups to really isolate behaviours and there could be a whole host of external factors,” Onisk said.

Here’s where AI comes in. “By leveraging generative AI you can create a kind of conversational playground and actually create simulated environments.”

He gave an example. Skillsoft have a conversation AI simulator called Casey that uses GPT-4 Azure OpenAI stack through Microsoft to track and measure the sentiment of conversations in a highly realistic scenario to “get to a reasonable proximity of what behaviour change could be”.

This could encompass “everything ranging from how to coach and counsel team members that may be struggling with certain performance issues, to how you engage with clients, to how you build executive presence – all the skills that organisations look to drive and focus on”.  

“We think that presents some really exciting capabilities… to track the things that are important to service delivery,” Onisk said, with great potential and demand for customising such capabilities to individual governments and departments.