Whitehall fast-tracks IT talent
Government professionalism agenda gains ground with Technology in Business graduate programme
Whitehall’s fast stream for promising graduate recruits will next year include a technology-specific talent pool for the first time.
Applications for the Technology in Business (TiB) scheme from students due to graduate next summer will start next month.
The programme is part of the IT professionalism agenda being developed by the eGovernment Unit (eGU).
The aim is to train top-flight technology graduates to look beyond strategy formulation to how plans can be put into practice, says eGU director of professionalism Katie Davis.
‘We want to create a new generation of people who can see that the end of the game is not the policy decision itself but the delivery of that decision,’ she said.
‘We are starting small this year, but there is huge demand for these people.’
TiB recruits will go through the usual fast-stream programme with added extras from eGU, including a chief information officer mentor and experience of a large-scale mission-critical technology programme.
The proposal has been welcomed by IT skills experts.
Karen Price, chief executive of skills sector council e-Skills UK, says the scheme sends a significant message. ‘This is no longer second class, it is a priority for government,’ she said.
Senior civil servants need to experience at least one project from start to finish, says Philip Virgo, strategic adviser to user group the Institute for the Management of Information Systems.
‘There are very few people who have even seen a full project lifecycle; that kind of experience is extremely rare, and it is an invaluable experience,’ he said.
‘In an ideal world no one would make it to permanent secretary without having had responsibility for implementing information systems, however small, so that they actually understand what is involved. That understanding is critical to be able to run a large organisation.’
John Suffolk, head of the eGU, says shortages of high-level skills such as enterprise architecture are a big problem for major government programmes.
‘There may be only a handful of people with the skills or practical experience at this scale,’ he said. ‘We just don’t have the number of people we need in the right place at the right time.’
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