Ruth Owen
Head of the Operational Delivery Profession
How did you tackle the biggest challenges facing your organisation in 2014?
2014 has seen the profession make good progress – in particular in the area of professional development, as well as building our community across our large and dispersed profession.
Operational Delivery has about 280,000 members across almost every government department. I think it is fair to say that not all 280,000 would yet recognise themselves as being part of a profession, so creating our community and our communications have been key.
We launched our new website at the start of the year. We recognise our members don’t have a lot of time for development, so we have addressed that by making it as simple as possible to access all the information needed to understand the profession and, more importantly, the tools you need to plan your career and professional development. We have a strong learning curriculum and our very popular ‘career mapper’ which helps you identify new opportunities to move between departments within the profession based on your skills and experience.
I am very proud of our biggest achievement this year: the launch of our externally accredited qualifications, from level 2 to level 7, which give our members the opportunity to develop their skills and gain recognised professional qualifications.
What are your profession’s top priorities in the last months before the general election?
We must continue to equip our members to be the best they can possibly be in their respective delivery roles, delivering for the government and for the citizens and businesses of this country. We are refreshing our Capability Plan to ensure we have the right learning in place for our members. We are also working across the profession to develop a shared view of what operational roles of the future will look like. In particular, as digital increasingly changes the way we deliver services, we need to develop new skills for multi-channel operations. And we’ll need to find ways to work more flexibly across departmental boundaries, supporting peaks of work as they arise.
2015 will also see the first intake of our new Operational Delivery apprentices – a great opportunity for school leavers to join the civil service and learn new skills at the front line; and a great opportunity for the civil service to bring in young people with a new and fresh perspective.
What’s your favourite Christmas treat? And what makes you say: ‘Bah, humbug!’?
As my partner is Australian, we spend every other Christmas in Australia: my Christmas treat this year will be a very hot and chilled-out Christmas Day in Melbourne. So I will be saying “bah humbug” to the cold British weather.