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Why growing talent from within is key to closing the digital skills gap
In the sixth episode of Leading into Tomorrow, experts from EY and the UK government discuss the digital skills shortage in the public sector and suggest ways to tackle it.
Public sector organizations globally need people with digital, data and technology skills to deliver value and meet the expectations of citizens. Yet the UK government alone has 4,000 vacancies.
In this episode, our host, presenter and reporter Kait Borsay discusses how to close the digital skills gap with Thomas Beautyman, Deputy Director, Government Digital Capability at the UK Cabinet Office. Also sharing their insights are Josie Cluer, Partner, People Advisory Services, Ernst & Young LLP, and Arnauld Bertrand, EY Global Government & Public Sector Consulting Leader.
All three speakers agree that the need for digital skills extends to every public sector role. But with everyone competing for the same talent, organizations should focus on upskilling and re-skilling the people they already have — across all roles and levels.
Key takeaways:
Building a tech-enabled workforce starts with identifying and prioritizing the skills the organization has now versus what it’ll need in future, and incorporating this into workforce planning.
Leaders must recognize that proactively investing in these skills is necessary to realize the benefits of becoming fully digital. They must also role-model change for the rest of the organization.
By training their people while improving the wider employee value proposition, public sector organizations will be able to tell a better story about their attractiveness as employers.
If you’d like to read more, a full text transcript of this podcast is available.
Kait Borsay
Hello and welcome to Leading into Tomorrow, a podcast series from EY, looking at how governments are using technology-driven strategies to help deliver their visions of a better future.
I’m your host, Kait Borsay, and each episode we’re joined by expert guests from around the world, sharing their specialist insight.
Our focus this time is on the digital skills shortage that many governments are facing in their workforce. And the strategies public sector leaders are implementing to alleviate that pressure, and deliver a better service and experience for citizens.
Joining me are Thomas Beautyman, Deputy Director of Government Digital Capability at the UK Cabinet Office. Hello Thomas!
Thomas Beautyman
Hello.
Borsay
Josie Cluer, Partner, People Advisory Services, EY UK and Ireland. Hello Josie!
Josie Cluer
Hi.
Borsay
And Arnauld Bertrand, EY Global Government & Public Sector Consulting Leader. Hi Arnauld!
Arnauld Bertrand
Hello Kate.
Borsay
Thomas, let’s start with you. You’re responsible for how the UK government grows its capability in digital and data. Can you outline your recruitment priorities for Digital, Data and Technology roles, known as DDaT, in the Civil Service?
Beautyman
So, right now in government — in the UK government at least — we have something like 4,000 vacancies. So that 4,000 vacancies represent a gap in our capacity to deliver services for citizens, it means that we are in a position where we have to engage other third parties to help us to bridge that gap, and to address that challenge, we are doing a number of things. We are going through a process of transforming our recruitment service so that candidates and vacancy holders have a seamless experience. That’s our vision, that’s our holy grail. We’re also thinking carefully about what is our overall employee value proposition? What are all the reasons why somebody might choose to come and join us and then all the reasons why somebody might choose also to stay with us. And that obviously includes pay, but it also includes actually many other aspects of why we make a choice: everything from the kind of work that they’re going to be doing, the environment that we want to work in, the opportunities that there are to grow and have really fulfilling careers.
Borsay
Josie, what’s the picture in terms of the UK and Ireland jobs market currently in relation to the shortage of DDaT skills? How significant is the shortfall overall?
Cluer
Well, lots of people are describing it as a skills crisis, and the picture that Thomas paints about the UK government I think is shared by all organizations up and down the country. So, 81% of organizations in the UK say they need more digital skills and the UK government’s analysis suggests that this costs the UK economy £63 billion a year. So, what that means is that Thomas and the government are competing with lots of organizations who are in the same spot, and they’re competing for the same skills and the same talent. So, all organizations are thinking about how they attract and retain the same people. And what we’re seeing is a pay differential opening up. So, digital skills attract up to 29% more in pay and that increases as you go up the scale and get more senior. We’re seeing organizations really investing in upskilling and re-skilling.
Borsay
Thomas, when we look at your role of upskilling the digital capabilities of the UK Civil Service, what are the main challenges you are facing?
Beautyman
So we think about digital and data capability, I suppose, in terms of two key groups. The first group is all of those people who might identify themselves as digital-makers. The people building systems like Universal Credit and other flagship systems in the UK Civil Service. They’re coders. They’re delivery managers. They’re user researchers. And in our government, that represents about 20,000 permanent civil servants. There’s then everybody else, all of those other civil servants, there’s all of those leaders who also need to play a part and feel skilled and confident to understand how they might use data effectively. How they might build services that deliver really tangible and improved outcomes for citizens. So, our focus is across both of those groups. There’s the 20,000 digital-makers and then there’s 500,000+ other civil servants.
One of the biggest challenges is simply to build on Josie’s point, the ability for the market to serve what we need. There are simply not enough skills in the UK labor market to go around. So, we are competing. In some cases, we compete within, between government organizations, between government departments, between central and local government. In many cases though, it’s between, I suppose, public sector and private sector. And that means we need to get smarter with telling our own story. More critically, however, like many other organizations, it is increasingly recognized that we need to grow talent from within.
Borsay
Arnauld, EY recently published a report called How can government workers and technology align to serve future citizens? Can you give us some of the key takeaways from the research?
Bertrand
Sure, with pleasure. First and foremost, I would say that, to better serve citizens, you have to put both citizens and public sector employees at the center of the game to bring both value to the citizen, or whether it is, in fact, our businesses, and to public servants. Second, it was quite interesting to see that only 7% of public agencies are meeting their digital transformation goals at the moment, which means that there is still a gap and that governments are still very late when it comes to digital transformation and digital services, which is key to offer to their stronger and more efficient public services. And there is a huge expectation from the population after the COVID-19 pandemic and with people working more from home, there is as well a key issue by transforming digitally the state to strengthen public sector brand and attractiveness. Thirdly, I would say that our report proposes four strategies to kind of reinvent the public sector workforce.
The first one is definitely to better forecast workforce needs, especially at a time where technology and innovation are constantly changing the right skills you need to operate. The second point is definitely to bridge the skills gap, and we spoke about it, and it is all about recruiting, training and retaining. The third one is to enhance the employee experience. It is really to build experiences that are moving from silos, working from what it was in the past — and people were working for the industry of finance for their whole life — to full mobility. And this is a unique occasion for government, and for public servants, because most of the time government are one of the — if not the biggest — the largest employers in the country, and therefore they can offer an exceptional experience that is hard to find in the private sector. The last one is to change the government leaders’ culture and the way to manage various generations with various expectations.
Borsay
Josie, when we look at the planning involved to digitally upskill the public sector workforce, how much is the sheer scale of it proving to be a hindrance to that transformation?
Cluer
When we think about transformation in the public sector, we need to prioritize the skills that we do have. So, where there is scarcity, i.e., not enough digital skills, we need to make sure that they’re in the right place, and therefore, linking the deployment of digital skills to workforce planning is really important.
And then the second thing that I think is really important, to build on what Thomas was saying, is not just about the digital-makers, so our digital experts, but really thinking across the whole of the civil service or the whole of the public sector, because there is no public sector role that doesn’t need to understand, be literate with, be fluent with data, digital and technology. An example from somebody I was talking to the other day who works in the justice system, she was pointing to the Wagatha Christie court case in the UK, which is about a footballer’s wife who changed the different settings on her Instagram to identify who had been leaking stories about her. The judge presiding over that case really needs to understand: What is it you can do with Instagram? What is it you can do with social media? So that he, in this case, could be effective in his role.
Borsay
Thomas, let’s talk about how government can develop digitally aware leaders to challenge established practices, manage digital transformation and encourage employees to embrace a digital mindset. Walk us through the process of that.
Beautyman
To some people, digital is a foreign word. For some, it conjures up connotations of the IT Crowd program where there’s a small office of IT geeks in the corner of the organization, that somehow serves all of your IT needs. To some people though, it is just a bit of a mystery. It’s a black box that they don’t really understand, and in many cases, and this includes leaders, they don’t necessarily feel confident to go and find out or really ask, maybe even in some cases some quite simple questions as to what does it really mean? And what does it mean for their business?
So, last year, we set up, for the first time, a set of standards for senior civil servants that we are helping them to get to, which explains almost the essential skills and confidence that they need to fulfil their roles of the future. They might be in commercial, in HR, in an operational delivery role or a policy role, but what we set out was that, with their expected future, they will feel confident to use data in a really intelligent way, to make sure that, when they’re presenting a business case for example, they’re able to use the right visuals and be confident in the integrity of their data in the story that they’re telling. We want them to be able to work with a user-first mindset, to really get under the skin of what do the citizens that they are serving really need from the services. We want them to be innovative, to help their teams to try different things in different ways of delivering, and evolve their products.
So, step one for us was defining that standard. Step two is making sure that we have a suite of products, of training courses, of learning that sits behind that, so that senior civil servants can go and genuinely equip themselves with those new skills. Then, of course, everything that goes with it is the campaign around it, and then there is sponsorship. The sponsorship from the very highest levels of government to be able to role-model and demonstrate the skills that you need and show senior civil servants that they should be looking to play their part and lead from the front.
Borsay
Goodness. Arnauld, let’s go on to you. The World Economic Forum estimates that, to adapt to the new tech-enabled workplace, public sector workers will have to change around 40% of their core skills in the next five years. Globally, how are governments dealing with the challenges of upskilling their workforce?
Bertrand
Well, you raised quite a challenge, and I will say that it varies a lot from one country to another, but with some common trends. The first one is definitely the effort for government to recruit new digital talents, like scientists, like cyber experts and so on. The more difficult is both to train the top and middle management through academies or online training. And even more, and that’s probably a shared weak point across the globe, which is to re-skill or to upskill the vast majority of public servants. We are seeing progress in some cases, in some departments, like, for example, in the tax office, that was often in advance on the field of digital re-skilling and digital transformation. Same probably on the police forces or security forces, that are using technology a lot to improve their services, but there is still some part of the government that is very far away and I will take one that was deeply impacted by COVID which is education, and especially teachers and, at the moment, if you take most of them — even if there is some best practice in some country like Australia, for example — we both need to improve their technology skills, their capacity for example to use Teams or some other platform, but as well to adapt their pedagogy to a new way of learning.
Borsay
Finally, whether it’s recruitment, retraining or retention, what advice do each of you have for government leaders facing digital skills shortages? Josie, some nuggets of wisdom from you first.
Cluer
I think I’d say that government leaders have to lean into the fact that there aren’t enough digital skills to go around, and therefore they can’t rely on just recruiting people. Absolutely they need to think about training, skilling, upskilling, re-skiling.
Borsay
And Thomas?
Beautyman
I would have two pieces of advice: Firstly, don’t underestimate what you’ve already got. Our most precious resource is the people that we’ve already got, and even where we talk about digital skills, actually there are many people who maybe already have a large proportion of the skills they need to play those digital roles, but they might need some help to acquire more skills. I think my second piece of advice would be: To invest or not invest is a choice and it’s really important now that leaders and decision-makers understand the risk and the consequence of not thinking proactively about the resources that they need and investing ahead of time.
Borsay
And Arnauld?
Bertrand
Well probably three words. Train, train and train. Both to have better resources, to retain these resources and to increase public sector creativeness and branding, and as well to take full advantage of the amazing potential of innovative digital technologies. If you don’t have the right resources internally, if you don’t train your people, you will never manage to fully transform in a digital way, or to fully become digital at the government level.
Borsay
Some common themes there. Well, that’s it for this episode. Thank you very much to all of you for joining us. It’s been a fascinating conversation, hasn’t it? Thomas, thank you to you.
Beautyman
Thank you.
Borsay
Josie, thank you.
Cluer
Thanks.
Borsay
And Arnauld, once again, thank you to you.
Bertrand
Thank you, Kait.
Borsay
Well, that’s it for now, but do join us again for more insight into how governments are delivering technology-driven strategies. Also, do subscribe to this series so you won’t miss an episode. From me, Kait Borsay, thanks for listening and bye for now.
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