Transformational change to tackle the digital skills gap

The public sector is having a tough time finding and keeping people with digital skills to bring about meaningful change – creating a digital skills gap. From delivery managers, user-centred design specialists, developers to data and cyber security experts – we’re all facing the same challenges.

In this in-person event in Westminster, Made Tech and DWP joined Digital Leaders to host a private discussion with government departments and other organisations, to explore a few challenges with skills in the public sector, with ideas on how to overcome them.

Topics of interest in the digital skills gap conversation

Challenges

• The recruitment pause due to COVID slowed things down to the point that departments are still recovering and falling behind on recruitment targets
• There’s a real need to help departments generate data-driven insights and make decisions that can support recruitment
• How can departments to define their employer value proposition?
• Departments are often competing to hire the same people
• Competition on pay with the private sector: how to value the benefits?

Skills exchange

• Incentivise upskilling and training of civil servants by partners/consultancies
• More departments learning from each other with more apprenticeships schemes and frequent joint brainstorming sessions

AI transformation

• What are the opportunities of AI transformation and how do they outrun potential risks?
• Joined-up thinking: how can departments get data-driven insights and share it between them to minimise some of the challenges?

Outputs

These topics generated a healthy and fruitful discussion on how departments can help each other and work with partners to tackle these issues. A few outputs from the digital skills gap conversation were around tips and advice on organisations some departments are working with to support this:

• Coding Black Females
• AWS
• Futuredotnow
• Women in data

For more detail on how we’re supporting this, there’s more information on our digital transformation services, including case studies: