Government’s got talent

When Frank Whittle applied to join the Royal Air Force, he was rejected because he was too short. Undeterred, he kept applying – and on his third attempt was accepted as a technical apprentice. Five years later, he’d been made an officer pilot; and after another seven years, he began work on the jet engine – pioneering new technology which would revolutionise aeronautics. By the time he retired in 1948, he held a knighthood and the rank of air commodore.

Whittle’s progress from apprentice to commodore is testament to the importance of spotting and nurturing talented individuals. So when Civil Service World teamed up with IBM Smarter Workforce (formerly known as Kenexa) to run a round table on how to make the most of the civil service’s skills, it seemed fitting to host it in a room at the Institute of Mechanical Engineers emblazoned with the details of Whittle’s life story and technical achievements.

As departments and agencies face a continued squeeze on already lean budgets, they will need to spot every possible innovator, nurture every potential leader, and support every skilled professional to meet the challenge of delivering ambitious corporate and policy reforms before the next election. And that task is made bigger still by the sheer range of skills and capabilities required in government: “At one end, we’ve got the environment department and you’re talking about skills for vets,” commented Chris Last, head of civil service HR at the Cabinet Office, “and at the other end you’ve got the Ministry of Defence and you’re talking about missile technologies. There probably aren’t many other big organisations that have that spread of skills.”

Last added, however, that there are plenty of common skills needs too: one crucial element of civil service reform is to get better at spotting, developing and sharing these skills across the service, rather than leaving each department to do its own thing. Last year, Last’s team produced the Civil Service Capabilities Plan to identify common skills gaps, and it has introduced a Competency Framework to make it easier to identify, compare, and develop skills across the civil service.

Alongside the Competency Framework, the Cabinet Office launched a competency self-assessment programme last year, and by the end of the year almost two-thirds of civil servants had taken part. The results of these assessments, it is hoped, will help departments to spot skills gaps – and not just gaps in the capabilities needed right now, but also weaknesses in the skills likely to be required as policy, society and technology move on. As Julie Taylor, strategic lead for talent and capability at the Home Office, put it: “It’s really important that we spend enough time balanced between our current skills gaps, and where our future skills gaps might be.”

Civil Service Resourcing’s head of design, Linda McKendrick, emphasised the need to “get better at professionalising the data that we have, including the workforce projections. If we can do that we’ll have a better sense of what we’ll need in the future.” She added a practical example of using workforce data and workload predictions to plan future skills needs. The tax profession within HM Revenue & Customs, she said, is “looking at whether a new administration would look at more direct taxation or more indirect taxation, and what that means for the future needs of the profession.”

The central HR team is working to collect better data, but McKendrick acknowledged that there needs to be “a more straightforward approach to data capture”. Currently, departments often receive ad hoc requests for particular datasets, but she suggested that “the rhythm and cycle of data capture” should be clearly set out, reducing the burden on departments and allowing them to collect information in good time. Meanwhile, she pointed out, departments are moving to to share HR data on a routine basis. “The big five departments are keen to work together so that in the future we have something more like a data warehouse, which would cover 85% of the civil service,” she said, adding that some large departments are advising smaller organisations on how to cleanse datasets and extract relevant information from suppliers.

Though there is work to be done in improving data collection, Phil Higginson, head of operations at Civil Service Learning, pointed out that the data collected so far is already having an impact on how departments are spending their training budgets. “Now departments have more data than they’ve ever had on where their skills gaps are, and we’ve got bookings up to 12 months in advance,” he said. “Already, that information is being used and departments are prioritising their spending.”

Last warned, however, that there is a danger of drowning in numbers and statistics. “There is a fine balance between having enough data to be able to effectively workforce-manage, and having so much that you do nothing with it,” he said. “We have to ensure that we’re collecting data that is going to be useful.” To make the data useful, suggested Kate Skowronska, organisation design lead for Defra, departments need to “give line managers the skill-set to interpret the data” and understand what to do with the information.

McKendrick agreed, adding that the focus on data collection and analysis shouldn’t detract from the need to relate to people on a one-to-one level. “The most important thing is the quality of the conversations that we have, and using insight and intelligence rather than just hard data,” she said. “We can get into a mechanistic way of working, especially in the big departments.”

Finding talent
Once you’ve identified the skills you have and need, how do you bridge any gaps? One obvious way is to recruit skilled staff from other organisations or sectors. Here, of course, the civil service is hampered by salary caps and weakening benefits. While departments are able to negotiate extra money to meet specific business needs, civil service pay – at least for some key professions – is set to remain much lower than that in the private sector. For Last, the dilemma emphasises the need for the civil service to recruit people young and develop its own talent. “We stand a much better chance of getting capable people if we’ve hired them as graduates and trained them through the system,” he said. “There will always be market pressures, but if we’ve trained somebody well there’s more chance that you can get the skills you need at a price you’re able to pay.”

The capabilities self-assessments may also help the civil service to identify talented staff who have the potential to develop and fill those skills gaps. As well as the Fast Stream programme, the civil service runs development programmes for staff with high potential centrally, in departments, and within many professions. However, Graham O’Connell, Civil Service Learning’s head of strategy and curriculum, wondered “whether our systems help identify hidden talent or facilitate that niche journey that will help people achieve their potential.” The civil service, he said, “is really good at helping people where we have spotted the talent, but we’re not so good at unleashing the hidden talent that people have day-to-day in their current posts.”

John Rule, Defra’s head of learning and development, said this work depends on the quality of line managers – a theme to which the participants kept returning. “A good manager,” said Rule, “will scratch beneath the surface and find where somebody has a talent.”

As well as finding talent, the civil service must find ways to allow individuals to develop the skills that will best suit their preferred career – whether that means general management, or a specialist profession. Some participants highlighted the challenge of maintaining specialist training whilst the main agenda is about sharing more training, but O’Connell argued that the current system can adapt to people’s needs. “I have seen in the past situations where you had generalists and specialists and the pendulum swung as to who was in favour at any given time,” he said. “I think these days it’s about anybody being able to find the right path.”

Importance of line management
Managers aren’t just crucial in spotting talent, said Clodagh O’Reilly, assessment and leadership consulting leader at IBM Smarter Workforce: they can decide whether their teams retain talented staff and lose them to another organisation. And some participants highlighted tensions between the staff engagement and performance management agendas: “It’s a real challenge for a line manager to balance up performance [management] with developing people,” said Phil Higginson, head of operations at Civil Service Learning. “I think we need to put some balance between performance objectives and development objectives, so more managers recognise that it’s an equally important part of their jobs.”

Another way to support staff development is through mentors – individuals who can coach and advise staff on how to develop their careers. Gareth Wakefield, business planning and resource leader at the Valuation Office Agency, said that he’s tried this – with some success. “A mentor can give [an individual] a wider perspective, and they can then have better conversations with their line managers,” he said.

However, it was also clear that most attendees felt that individuals need to take more responsibility for their own careers. To make this work, it was felt, the civil service needs to guard against its more paternalistic instincts. “Culturally, in the public sector there is a mentality that things will be done for you,” said Lesley Bryant, client partner at IBM Smarter Workforce. “If you go out into the private sector it’s much more about taking responsibility for your own career development.” Her comments met widespread agreement. “I say to HR people when they ask about their career: ‘Well, what have you done about your career?’,” said Last. “Nobody should care more about their careers than individuals themselves.”

Sharing skills
With resources under pressure, another way to develop individuals and fill skills gaps is to move talented staff between departments. This was a focus of the Civil Service Capabilities Plan, and became the subject of a prolonged and reflective discussion at the round table. While there were positive comments about progress to date, it was clear that there is still a long way to go.

On a prosaic level, the lack of shared systems such as IT infrastructure can create barriers. Defra’s Skowronska said that even moving between organisations within her own department can be problematic. “Taking my laptop and plugging into another organisation within Defra isn’t simple, because systems aren’t compatible,” she said. The move towards common IT standards and greater shared procurement across government might help address these practical issues, but there are also cultural problems to deal with: it was widely acknowledged that departments tend to regard staff as their own, not as employees of the wider civil service.

Jeanette Forder, a leadership and engagement specialist in the Ministry of Defence’s HR directorate, explained the challenge in her own department: “The MoD can be quite inward-looking and think of ourselves as being unique, she said. “We’ve got our own internal talent programme and badge it that we’re developing that talent for the MoD. I hear lots of conversations about people on this scheme wanting to go to the FCO on secondment for a couple of years, and people saying: ‘Why would we let them go after putting all this time into developing them?’”

This is not just an organisational issue, but a challenge for individual line managers. “We have seen barriers, with departments that are really willing to be flexible but where the underlying HR process is still a challenge; with line managers not wanting to let people go,” said IBM’s Bryant. That fits with Skowronska’s experience at Defra. “There is a lot of protectiveness from line managers,” she said. “If they let go of this very talented person, they might not get him or her back”.

Attendees agreed that staff need to be encouraged to see the civil service as their employer – not just the department they currently work for. In addition, when staff do move out of a department for a time, the skills they gain must be properly recognised on their return. Forder said that while “there are lots of policies to recognise those skills and development, whether that happens in reality… I wouldn’t like to comment.” Nigel Lower, learning and talent development manager at the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, added: “We send a lot of people out on secondment, and when they come back they often feel undervalued.” However, according to IBM Smarter Workforce’s managing director Andrew Jackson, there is good practice elsewhere – particularly at the work and pensions department, which has “worked very hard at putting capabilities in place to capture skills effectively, whether or not those skills have been gained internally”.

No matter the challenges, the direction of travel in civil service HR is clear: the civil service is one organisation, and should act as such. The Civil Service Reform Plan sets out the ambition to encourage more movement across the service, and the reformed Fast Stream programme works to give future leaders a corporate, rather than departmental, view of the service. “You’ve got to take a strong position,” said Last. “As we’ve hired more trainees, we’ve been absolutely explicit that they need to move geographically and they need to move between departments. The message gets through.”

There are positive signs, with attendees from both central and departmental teams speaking of a spirit of collaboration, and the expectation that this will lead to even better co-operation in the future. ‘The collaborative work that’s being done across departments is breeding its own success,” said Forder. “The MoD hasn’t been known for playing ball, but actually as our makeup has changed and we’ve got more fast-streamers coming in, that perspective starts to change. There is a greater appetite to be at that cross-government table and to talk about corporate opportunities.”

For all the talk of data, processes and management, the discussion ended with a return to the most important element of civil service skills management: individual staff members and their potential. “Most individuals want to be developed,” said Last. “Most people want to be successful. If we tap into that, it’s a win for the individual but also the wider organisations.”

Again, Frank Whittle proves the point. The RAF may have been slow to spot his talent – but once his potential had been identified, the combination of his talent and determination, and an employer ready to invest in skills, led to both personal acclaim for Whittle, and a whole new way of flying.