Investing in capability
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Like all organisations, the civil service is in a battle for talent.
It is losing that battle.
Government often attracts brilliant people who want to work on important and impactful problems. Becoming mission-oriented should further enhance that appeal. But government struggles to convince those people that they will find a working environment in which they can bring their talents fully to bear, that they will continue to develop those professional skills, and that they shouldn’t switch to a private sector job with double the salary.
For example, the government estimates it has less than half the number of digital, data, and technology specialists and leaders it needs when benchmarked against comparable organisations. The civil service will also need to upskill the next generation of generalist leaders and recruit specialists if there is to be any hope of addressing the shortfall. At the same time, it’s important to develop the skills and knowledge of other professions across government—finance, procurement, policy, and so on—so that they have the understanding and capability to be just as focused on missions as the mission teams themselves.
There’s another whole other report to write about HR, recruitment, and retention in Whitehall. Many specialists find they hit a professional ceiling where they can rise no further—the upper pay bands of the civil service being largely reserved for generalists, with generalists’ strengths.
The pros and cons of a civil service career (pro: better holidays, a better pension, a better work-life balance, more job security; con: worse pay) contribute to a monoculture. This is compounded by the lack of porosity in the civil service—it remains relatively rare for officials to leave and rejoin Whitehall, or for mid- or senior-level hires to come in from outside government.
Addressing the current and growing capability gap will demand substantial interventions. Civil service training is a pale shadow of what it was 50 years ago. A National College for Government would pay for itself in saved management consultancy fees. Investing in that—and making it open to participants from outside the civil service—would start to answer the need for a talent pipeline in expensive, scarce skills like cyber security or data science. Retraining existing officials in such skills—those who may be more tempted to stay given their pension investments—offers a better chance of retention than focusing solely on graduates.
We must also rethink how civil servants are rewarded. Again, that does not mean throwing out the existing package. But it must involve a full discussion of how sufficient flexibility is introduced to induce and retain a far more diverse pool of talent, recognising both the fact that people’s needs change over time, and that the labour market itself is changing fast.