The Cabinet Office has signed a deal worth up to £7m with educational services giant Pearson to deliver a cross-government skills platform that the department says will help it create “the most accurate picture ever achieved of skills availability across government”.
The Government Skills Campus platform will offer access to core training for all government employees in a single place for the first time, alongside resources aimed at individual departments and professions.
Plans for the digital skills campus were included in the Civil Service People Plan 2024-2027, published in January. The campus will bring about the “first pan-CS skills taxonomy to provide consistency in approach to defining and measuring skills” and skills passports that are recognised across departments, according to the people plan.
As well as enabling civil servants to track their training and skills, online profiles will be used to generate personalised training recommendations, the Cabinet Office said in an announcement this week.
The data collected via the platform will help managers to plan recruitment, development and talent management initiatives more strategically, it added.
Pricing details for the four-year deal are redacted in published contract documents, but say the project will cost between £5.5m and £7m.
Sixty-eight suppliers expressed an interest in running the platform, eight of which were shortlisted for panel review, according to the Cabinet Office.
Pearson was one of the final three would-be suppliers selected to deliver product demonstrations, before securing the contract.
Rebecca Birs, business change lead for the Cabinet Office, said: “Our ambition is to provide a great user experience for all government employees, empowering them to take charge of their own training and development needs and take a proactive approach to developing their own careers. In addition, the data we will be able to harness will enable the civil service to bring about a significant step change in its skills and workforce planning capabilities.
“Now that the contract has been awarded, we will be working with Pearson to design a rollout plan that will see the new platform implemented across government over the next two years.”