Public sector IT skills boost

Watmore: instigated skills agenda

Leeds City Council’s 345-strong IT department is at the vanguard of plans to establish a fully-fledged technology profession within the public sector.

The local authority is the first such body to implement a skills competency framework developed by the Cabinet Office’s eGovernment Unit (eGU) as part of its IT professionalism agenda.

Using the generic eGU framework, combined with additional behavioural elements, Leeds has mapped the current skills of all of its technology staff.

Employees can now continually submit evidence of both their progress and their ambitions using a specially-built intranet portal, called Aspire.

The process is a major change for the organisation, says Leeds Council chief information officer (CIO) Dylan Roberts.

‘It is a lot of commitment, but for the staff it provides clarity around pay structure, progression, what training they can request and so on,’ he said. ‘And for the CIO it gives the assurance that I have the right people with the right skills.’

All Leeds IT staff are using the scheme. Roberts says the council still has much to learn about the logistics of the new system, and is working with the eGU to help other public sector organisations make use of the framework.

The framework will only really come into its own if it can be established as a national standard, says Roberts.

‘The value of having this spread across the whole sector is immense – the economies of scale, the skills sharing between organisations and the opportunities for staff,’ he said.

Karen Price, head of sector skills group eSkills UK, said: ‘The significant thing is that this is an industry standard framework that is also being picked up by suppliers and users.’

Leeds’ progress is a major step for the overall IT professionalism agenda, says eGU deputy head of profession Anne Waldron.

‘We have gone from us producing something generic to give the IT profession existence on paper, to people using it as a tool to generate real information with their individual staff,’ she said.

The IT professionalism agenda is part of the Transformational Government strategy launched in November 2005 by then-Whitehall CIO Ian Watmore.