Join our working party
Are you looking to improve digital skills within your department or for government? Have you already started building ‘digital capability’ for civil servants? Or, are you wrestling with where to begin with user needs, design thinking and empowerment?
We believe that there’s a great opportunity for departments, local authorities and other interested bodies to collaborate and help build digital skills across government. That’s why we’re creating an informal working group to share successes and failures, research and learnings and we’d like you to be a part of it. There will be lots of ideas, practical inputs and discussions. Oh, and biscuits too.
A bit of background
We’re all facing a common challenge – how to build ‘digital’ skills in the civil service in order to improve public sector services, policies and processes.
Building these skills has been a major part of government strategy since 2012 with a ministerial speech recently re-emphasising the need for new skills among civil servants and for an approach that goes further than just building specialist digital teams in departments.
What we’re talking about is how we take skills native to digital – design thinking, user needs, agile processes – and apply them to new spaces, such as policy, service provision or business processes.
Work in progress
Some areas of government have already made a start. The Department for Communities and Local Government and Department for Work and Pensions have created digital academies for their teams while Civil Service Learning is developing a new set of programmes including Human Centred Design course for policy officials.
However, it seems to us that every department is facing similar challenges and questions such as:
- what does ‘digital capability’ mean?
- what impact do we want digital capability to have in our department?
- what skills do civil servants need to learn?
Get involved - contact us today
To help answer these questions and more besides, we’re aiming to bring together people from across a wide a range of government as possible.
We’re going to be holding our first meet on Thursday 25th June, from 2-4pm, atMinistry of Justice.
To come along or just to let us know you’re interested in taking part, email jack.collier@digital.justice.gov.uk.
1 comment
Comment by Dominic posted on
Users first; biscuits second.
"taking skills native to digital, and applying them to new spaces, such as policy, service provision or business processes"
One of my favourite aspects of the discipline of HCI is that it borrows and adapts methodologies from an almost limitless number of other disciplines. A kind of polymorphism, if you will. There is no reason this approach should not flow in all directions…