Learning about the future

Skills and staff development in the civil service have been a high priority for some time. There has been a big drive to improve the standard of management and leadership in the service; the public agency Government Skills has worked to improve training for civil servants; central government has been told to lead on hiring apprentices; and there has been a push to ensure that the central government ‘professions’ – which range from procurement specialists to HR officials – have the skills they need to do their job.

One of the major drivers behind this effort to improve the skill set within the civil service has been the aim of reducing costs. If a department lacks programme- and project-management skills, for example, it can end up hiring consultants or interims at a much higher cost than a full-time member of staff. A shortage of the right IT and procurement costs has regularly been blamed for pushing up the cost of new IT systems – either by requiring the use of consultants, or because the government failed to get as good a deal from IT suppliers as it might have.

As skills are such a priority, it is heartening to know that learning and development provision in the civil service gets a thumbs-up from most staff. In a Civil Service World survey that attracted responses from 1,728 civil servants in a variety of departments, professions and grades (for our methodology, see below), 47 per cent felt that the quality of learning and development had either greatly or slightly improved in the last three years, as shown in the graph below. This compares to 27 per cent who felt the quality of provision was unchanged, and 26 per cent who said it had either slightly or greatly deteriorated.

The answers to a slightly different question were similarly positive: asked how useful the training they received in 2009 was, 83 per cent said it was very or fairly useful, compared to 17 per cent who said it was not very useful or of no use. The civil servants were also asked whether there was any training they struggled to access; an impressive two-thirds replied in the negative.

These results are good news for civil service employers, who are clearly doing something right – especially given that civil servants link learning and development strongly to job satisfaction. Some 65 per cent said L&D was very important to job satisfaction, 32 per cent fairly important, and only three per cent said it was not very important. A fraction – 0.3 per cent – said it was completely unimportant, as you can see below.

Rationed learning

However, bearing in mind the cost pressures that will be placed on learning and development budgets in the coming years, there are some interesting lessons to be learned from the responses of those who were less content with their training. Of the third of civil servants who said that they do struggle to access training of one kind or another, 25 per cent mentioned cost and budget constraints as a particular problem. Meanwhile, around 10 per cent of the civil servants who said the quality of training had deteriorated chose to use an additional comments box to mention funding constraints.

With all central government budgets coming under pressure in future years – particularly those for back office as opposed to ‘frontline’ services – the number of government employees expressing dissatisfaction with learning and development provision may be expected to increase.

Among the third of officials who said they struggled to access training, 11 per cent said it was harder to access external training courses – including accredited training and degree courses – than internally provided sessions. Eleanor Goodison, a former civil servant employed most recently at the National School of Government (NSG) who now works as an independent consultant, says this is a trend she has noticed. She is particularly concerned that opportunities for accredited qualifications may be missed; it is, she says, “very important for people to have the opportunity to interact with peers outside the civil service”.

It is “slightly contradictory”, she adds, to demand a civil service that is more open to outside ideas, and then to limit opportunities to access outside courses. A one-day training course, she argues, “is a very good way to expose people to the way that people think and work outside the civil service. And it is relatively inexpensive, and cheaper than releasing them for a fortnight’s attachment.”

Another problem for the group which struggled to access training – particularly for civil servants based outside London – was finding the time and the funding to travel to courses. Tony Shaw, development director for training provider Westminster Explained (which is owned by CSW publisher Dods), says provision for the 75 per cent of officials who are based outside London can be awkward – and the push to move more officials out of the capital in coming years may worsen the problem. Providers such as Westminster Explained and the NSG already regularly provide training around the country, but Goodison says that even courses provided outside London may still require travel from, say, Newcastle to Birmingham, because there isn’t the critical mass of demand to support course provision at a bigger variety of locations.

Some respondents also said they struggled to find the time to take training courses. Goodison says the problem of juggling work demands and training needs, and the resulting no-shows that can occur, often push up the cost of training. “A lot of money is wasted on training that is booked and people don’t turn up,” she says; she recommends that managers plan more carefully to ensure that people are available on the day.

Another reccurring theme within the group that struggled to access training concerned difficulties with e-learning – and this corresponds with how people responded to the question about how valuable they found different forms of training, see the graph below. E-learning is rated as the least valuable form of training by 30 per cent of respondents, with only lunch-time sessions coming out worse. By contrast, classroom learning is viewed as the most valuable form of training by nearly 40 per cent of those who answered the survey.

Balancing cost and value

These results have the potential to cause a headache for learning and development budget holders, because a reduction in classroom teaching and a move to cheaper forms of learning such as computer-based courses is an obvious way to save some money. Indeed, Dr John McGurk, learning and talent development adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), says that compared to private employers the public sector has plenty of room for efficiencies here, because it currently does so much class-based learning. He also warns that the marked dislike for e-learning in our survey may be a generational thing.

However, while 78 per cent of our respondents are over 34 years old, there is no marked difference in the opinions of the younger respondents on this question. As 30 per cent of them also rate e-learning as the least valuable form of training, it does not look as though attitudes will change quickly as the computer generation become the majority.

Both Goodison and Westminster Explained’s Shaw, also a former civil servant, remember when e-learning was first introduced as a training tool in the civil service. It was “going to be a panacea”, says Goodison, but “it hasn’t really worked out like that”. The expectation is that officials should undertake the training at their desks, but some respondents said they struggled to get away from work distractions and devote time to the training. A few even said they would find it easier to do it from home.

Goodison says this lack of time is a “common problem” with less structured courses, and most of the experts to whom Civil Service World spoke emphasised that e-learning is best used in combination with other forms of training – perhaps in preparation for a class, or followed up with ‘action learning sets’ which apply the theory to a work context. Jackie Hammond, an interim HR manager who has worked in a number of different public sector bodies during her career, says different people suit different forms of learning, and it’s the responsibility of managers to take their employees’ needs into account. “You should be having that debate: if you have an employee who works for you who needs new knowledge, you should be having a discussion about what works for them,” she says.

E-learning is also not necessarily the cheapest option open to HR managers, according to Goodison. “We say face-to-face is expensive, and at the point where an individual takes it it is, but the investment in preparing e-learning is huge and departments are not getting that back because of the problems we have identified,” she explains. That investment in e-learning can add up to thousands, if not tens of thousands of pounds, she says, whereas training which is face-to-face, “will often be much less expensive to set up”.

There are other alternatives, and these could hold a lot of promise for HR managers looking to cut costs at the same time as continuing to develop staff skills. Hammond argues that courses only support some forms of learning and development: “A lot of it is about managers’ management of staff and how to do that through performance management.” This means, for example, giving staff “stretching work and targets and giving them guidance and feedback”.

Rod Clark, chief executive of the National School of Government, says that “the most effective way of getting learning in an organisation is by no means the one day of sitting in a classroom. It is making a connection between formal learning and application in the workplace; action learning sets and mentoring can be relatively low-cost compared to the impact you have.” Coaching and experiential learning are also popular with staff, our survey shows, with more than 60 per cent of respondents ranking them as top, second or third when rating forms of training by value.

Breaking down the headlines

If you splice the two main questions - about quality of training and the impact on job satisfaction - by the profile of the respondents, there are some interesting variations in opinions about civil service training. On the question of whether people feel their training has improved or deteriorated in recent years, for example, more respondents within HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) say it has ‘greatly deteriorated’ than that it has ‘greatly improved’ – though the overall numbers perceiving a deterioration and an improvement are about equal. Some HMRC respondents mention the growth of e-learning and budget constraints as the cause of their discontent, although the cause is less clear for other departments (on our graphic, above, we have listed only those departments with higher numbers of respondents).

There are also interesting variations with regard to professions. However, without the input of departments or profession heads, it is difficult to get to the bottom of what might lie behind these variations – and because the learning and development profession is currently going through some serious changes, few were willing to discuss these results publicly. A statement from the Cabinet Office, which is coordinating the strategic work taking place, simply welcomed the survey’s positive results and stated that: “We are currently exploring how we can make efficiencies and enhance even further the way we deliver learning and development by making more of methods such as mentoring, alongside traditional class room methods, to build an even more professional and skilled workforce.” The differences between professions and departments in our findings are certainly worth some extra investigation at a time when the profession is more open to questions.

There are also some differences in perceptions of learning and development among different grades: the more senior a civil servant is, the less important they consider training in deciding their job satisfaction. Senior civil servants are also more likely than lower grades to think the quality of their training has improved in recent years. Clark, head of the NSG – which specialises in senior level training – says this positive outlook might be caused by the “halo effect”: the more senior someone is, the more positive they are likely to be about their organisation. There is also a tendency for senior people “to believe that they know it all and therefore downplay how important further training is to them”. This, and a reluctance to admit they need more training at this stage in their career, could explain the low importance attached to learning and development among top grades, he says.

However, Clark warns that such an attitude is a mistake. “Life-long learning is absolutely essential to anyone in a career – the idea that you say you know it all is incredibly foolish,” he says. In addition, he adds, improving the skills of the people at the top and creating “quality leadership” is absolutely vital to the success of organisations – he points to the example of the impact a good head can have on a school as evidence of this argument. “Don’t underestimate the importance of investment at a senior level on a public service as a whole,” he says.

At the other end of the scale, Clark says he is “not at all surprised” to see that those in lower grades view learning and development as very important to their jobs. Interim HR manager Hammond also says she “would expect them to be striving a bit more” than their senior colleagues, but adds that it is unfortunate that their satisfaction levels are lower than those of the civil servants above them. However, she suggests this may be because their expectations are unrealistic.

“You need to delve into exactly why they feel they haven’t got the right training,” she says. “Sometimes people think they can always have more, but they don’t relate it to a business need – they are very much self-centred about it and feel they should be given this as treats”. Given the preponderance of comments made in the survey about cost and budget restraints, her argument that people are being turned down because their request for training does not fit a business case may have some weight.

Hammond believes that “staff need to be a little more self-sufficient in sorting themselves out”; if their line manager turns down their request for a particular training course, they “can go and get a book” or pay for the course themselves, she argues. “Public sector staff need to get a bit more like private sector staff in their outlook and take responsibility for their own development,” she says.

CIPD adviser McGurk agrees, and suggests that departments could ask new employees to do some homework before they start – such as looking into how the department and its ministers work – rather than holding a “totally pointless” classroom induction session. He says the bank Nationwide used this method with customer service staff, and reduced the time it took them to be ready to work with customers from 24 to 12 days. McGurk says it is about “taking advantage” of the fact that new starters will be keen to impress, especially in the current economic climate. “I think it is a real way forward, but companies don’t use it enough,” he says.

Keeping the troops happy

Overall, the results show that civil servants largely feel positive about the training they receive. But how can that satisfaction be maintained when budgets are going to shrink? Goodison says: “It is often the case that training budgets are the first to be cut when money is tight”, adding that departments will have to focus on getting better value for the money they spend. She, and all the experts contacted by Civil Service World, say that employers will have to prioritise what to buy and what to abandon.

McGurk recommends a focus on relevance, alignment and measurement – or “Ram”, as he terms it: asking why something is being done; making sure that it is what people want and need; and measuring it to ensure that it achieves the aim. “These are relatively simple principles, but unfortunately I don’t think it is often done,” he says. On a “more glib level”, he adds, a budget cut of 15 per cent may mean it is no longer possible to buy bespoke training products.

Goodison doesn’t agree with this, arguing that a bit of planning can allow a bespoke session to kill more than two or three birds with one stone, making it much more cost-effective. If a manager and their team take a training session together, for example, the time can also be used, not only to get new skills, but as a team-building session and an opportunity to do some strategic planning. “If managers participate with their staff, they can be doing something very practical in terms of learning, but at the same time talking about a project and where it is going,” she explains.

A small number of the group who struggled to access training said the problem related to learning that would help them progress in their career, rather than being directly relevant to their current job. And when we asked respondents how HR departments should respond to future budget cuts, the most popular answer among all professions was to protect career development training (see figure 4, p28).

It’s clear that a financially-driven focus on business over individual needs may not be popular with staff. Goodison says such a move is probably inevitable in the short-term, but warns against the situation being allowed to continue for too long. “Obviously, in the longer-term, if you neglect your workforce as a whole it is going to be less useful to you,” she warns. HR interim Hammond says the civil service has been getting better at talent management and career planning, but believes there will always be an element of discontent. “You can’t develop a lot of people with a lot of skills if they’re not going to be using them,” she points out.

The figure above shows that, after protecting career development training and ring-fencing training budgets, respondents suggested protecting specialist training and management training – with some variation depending on their profession. Our survey also asked civil servants which forms of training they are most keen to access in 2010-11 (shown in the figure below), and it is interesting to compare these findings to those in figure 4. Tax officials are particularly keen to access and protect specialist training, highlighting a gap in learning and development that HMRC insiders identified some time ago. No one from HMRC was available to discuss the issue, but it is known that further changes to tax training are to be announced before the summer.

Our findings show a large proportion of people keen to access management training – but a much smaller proportion picking out management training as a key area to protect. And Hammond says there is indeed a risk that the development of “soft skills”, such as influencing stakeholders, will fall by the wayside. She says the civil service has only just got to grips with the idea that such things are important, and doesn’t want the civil service to slip back on this front.

However, while the staff in our survey favoured specialist training over management training, a non-representative poll of 13 central government bodies showed that protecting management training is the most popular option among training managers – though protecting specialist training comes a close second.

As mentioned earlier, Clark believes leadership training is particularly important given the impact it can have on an organisation and a service as a whole. He also says leadership training needs to be very focused on “the things that need to be addressed to prepare the public service for the challenge ahead”, such as “achieving more for less”, better collaboration across the public sector, and improved staff engagement. Such skills, he adds, will not necessarily be passed on in a traditional way – say, in a class or seminar. Collaboration skills, for example, might be developed by bringing people from central and local government together, rather than by teaching them any particular skills, he says. “Getting people to move beyond the theory and become more used to operating in a more joined-up environment; that is the way to go.”

Learning a new way to shop

Another direction in which the civil service could turn its attention, says CIPD adviser McGurk, is to address the lack of coordinated thinking. “Because of the size and scope of the civil service and the fragmentation there, it’s easy for there not to be a common narrative around L&D,” he says – and this means duplication and increased costs. He is also concerned that CIPD research suggests that learning and development managers spend as much time delivering training as they do planning what they need; if delivery was more centralised, he says, L&D managers in the civil service would have more time to think strategically.

Clark says this coordination of learning and development across the public sector is very much the direction of travel, and reveals that a lot of work has been going on amongst learning and development professionals on exactly this point. The thinking does not just concern the pooling of public sector buying power, but also “the transactional investment” – the setting up, designing and thinking that goes on behind the purchase. The aim is to make sure that work is “being maximised rather than duplicated”, says Clark. “The sort of [financial] challenge we face is not going to be met by shaving a few candle ends, we have to rethink how we deliver,” he explains.

Tony Shaw, from Westminster Explained, says there has been much talk recently about the creation of something called “One HR” or “next generation”. The details of what this will comprise are sketchy – an announcement is expected after the election – but Shaw suggests it will involve centralising HR functions currently duplicated across government, in an attempt to get some economies of scale. Indeed, last summer civil service capability head Gill Rider told Civil Service World that the HR leaders council was looking at how “next generation HR” could provide operational efficiency through the creation of a shared service.

It will not be possible to bring some HR functions entirely together under one roof, but Shaw believes that learning and development is one area where centralised buying could create savings in both jobs and procurement prices. He says the move “will divide people”; the risk, he says, is that a centralised system would remove departments’ power to purchase training that diverges from very generic skills, reducing their flexibility to provide for their own specific needs. Clark, on the other hand, says there will always be space for an organisation to fulfil its particular requirements. “I’m talking about those areas of more generic skills sets,” he explains.

The devil of all this will be in the detail, and that is still to come; but a shared-service L&D function makes perfect financial sense at a time when the civil service is under pressure to save a lot of money on back office functions, while continuing to improve skills across the civil service in order to provide more with less.

However, such savings are unlikely to meet the needs of future budgets, and civil servants may have to accept that financial constraints will mean less training is available; there will certainly be less of the class-based learning that they prefer, and possibly less career development training not directly related to their roles. In future, civil servants may find themselves taking a more pragmatic – and possibly a more self-service – approach to their own career development.

Methodology

A link to our online survey on staff learning and development was sent out to all 20,000 registered users of www.civilservicelivenetwork.com, and they were told that participants would be entered for a prize draw with the chance of winning a £100 Amazon voucher.

Almost 10 per cent of those sent the survey – 1,728 – took part, answering all or some of the 18 questions we asked. Before using the data regarding any particular group in a graphic, we checked that the group comprised more than 25 respondents.

We sent a similar survey to the 40 biggest employers in central government; 13 responded in full or in part. In some instances, this data has been used in the text to cross-reference the responses of staff and managers.