This article is written by Shira Honig. Shira Honig is a dual Canadian-American citizen working as a senior data policy advisor in the Ontario Government and is a graduate of NYU's Wagner School of Public Service. She is Co-Chair of the Education Committee at the Technologists for the Public Good and recently contributed to Apolitical's course, Digital Fundamentals of Government.

  • The problem: Recruitment of tech talent into government gets more attention in the civic tech space than upskilling existing government employees does.
  • Why it matters: Recruitment of tech talent into government is an important part of the big picture of increasing digital maturity in government, but upskilling existing government employees is as–or more–important.
  • The solution: Civic tech and government leaders should devote more attention to tackling this issue.

Change doesn’t happen quickly in government because government is a complicated place.

I’ve spent more than eight years in government and more than two in civic tech, in the Ontario government. In that time, I’ve seen a lot of what doesn’t work, some great work on new ideas, and talked to many other civic tech practitioners across the globe about their own experiences.

A lot of emphasis in civic tech is placed on the need for improved recruitment practices, to find and bring talented people with tech skills into government to lend their expertise to digital product and service design and delivery.

And with good reason: for all the inspiring advances that have been made in digital government in the last 15 years, governments large and small continue to be defined by a lack of resources (people, technology, time), and a lack of understanding of digital and tech among staff and leaders.

Together these constraints prevent government teams from increasing their digital maturity levels to be able to provide to their constituents user-centred policies and online programmes and services that are easy to use, relevant, useful, reliable, and well-designed.

The problem that govtech seeks to address

There are many reasons why governments struggle with this, and they’re not the reasons most people think, especially those who haven’t worked in the bureaucracy (including politicians).

To outsiders, government is an opaque place. And at its least effective, government is equally unclear about the needs of the public(s) it is meant to serve.

This is exactly the problem that govtech, a part of the field of public interest technology, seeks to address: applying a laser focus on public needs that can’t be addressed by any other institution.

What’s being done right now to close the skills gap

A lot of programmes and organisations have been founded to address the skills gap:

The three most well-known of these fellowship programmes are the Presidential Innovation Fellowship programme, Coding it Forward and the United States Digital Corps in America. These programmes provide excellent examples of increasing digital and data talent and knowledge within government.

Outside consultancies–such as Bloom Works, US Digital Response, and Ad Hoc Teams–show different ways that tech experts can provide UX, product, content, and engineering skills to government on a project-by-project basis.

And in 2017, Tech Talent Project, a non-partisan, non-profit organisation, was founded to focus exclusively on the challenge of recruiting technically skilled leaders into key government roles.

The above short list is a very simplified snapshot of a young and still evolving field, yet it’s clear to me after researching the issue, combined with my own experiences working in government and civic tech, that much attention is devoted to recruiting from the outside in. But what about cultivating talent already on the inside?

Change doesn’t happen quickly in government for many reasons

Ask anyone who’s come to government from the private or other sectors, and they’ll tell you that you can’t just enter government and expect change to happen quickly. It’s not because the pace of work is slower. While some work is definitely (and in some cases unnecessarily) slow, some government work moves at lightning speed.

Change doesn’t happen quickly in government because government is a complicated place: it serves a huge variety of constituents with whom it has a complicated set of relationships; it deals with wildly difficult internal and public problems; administrations and priorities are constantly shifting; teams and managers are sometimes overwhelmed by the complexity and volume of the work they are tasked to do with limited resources and limited autonomy; and it is characterised by a set of deeply rooted constraints and incentives unlike anything in the private sector.

All of this results in a complex knot that is not so easy to untangle.

New people entering government vs. existing staff

There’s a lot to be said for people coming into government from the outside with a fresh perspective. Yet it’s also true that some of the people who best understand how to make–or what needs to be done first to make–even the smallest change within government are the brightest people who already work there.

This includes staff who are rarely consulted about big issues like talent retention or work priorities–staff who work at low levels, on the frontlines, or in technical roles, who are witness to both the good and the bad, and who probably have a lot to say on these topics and more.

So despite government’s overall low digital maturity levels, and despite people’s frequent resistance to change (which is the stuff of human nature everywhere), government staff’s intimate knowledge of how government works is unique and vital. And yet it’s vastly under-utilised.

The advantages–and disadvantages–of fellowship programmes

The best fellowship programmes understand that it takes time for new entrants to learn government, even if those people come from the most senior levels in the private sector. As a result, fellows serve for twelve months or two years. Almost all participants find the experience life-changing, and many stay in government long after the programme’s tenure. It’s proof that if you design a programme effectively, participants will stay true to their original goal of working on public issues that matter.

But even if you account for the wide impact these fellows have across agencies and teams in educating government employees about technology and data skills, most fellowship programmes are highly selective, which results in a very small number of fellows compared to the sheer number of staff who already work in government.

As a result, it may take a long time before fellows’ efforts reach a critical mass in a large organisation.

The role of vendors

External consultants, whether they come to government as political advisors or appointees, through a consultancy, or through a procurement process, are hired to provide government teams with project-based assistance. Most external consultants that I’ve observed or worked with have limited knowledge of how government works. On the rare occasions when they do, they are not hired to produce change at scale. They’re there to produce a set of deliverables and move on to their next client.

Why upskilling needs more attention

What if you just focused on changing management and leadership rather than training staff?

What if you could hire key leaders and managers that understood digital, data and technology, and spread civic tech values and culture across the organisation?

The latter is close to what the Tech Talent Project is aiming to achieve, and it’s a worthy goal, especially if you start with talent and HR executives. But these leaders would still need to get up to speed–that is, develop lived experience within government if they come from other sectors–to understand the rules well enough to either work within or around them. The number of people who know government and technology equally well is no doubt growing, but still rare indeed.

Which brings us back to staff, the majority of whom currently working in government do not work with technology or data, and have never met or worked with a “digital fellow”.

So doesn’t the question of how to upskill government staff deserve more attention?

In my next few posts, I’ll look at what efforts and initiatives exist right now, gaps, questions that remain, and ideas for a way forward.

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