3 ways to make the most of your learning in government

At a glance:

• 70% of the time you spend learning is informal, focus on maximising it;
• Collaboration is the power skill which will help you excel in a more complex world, start building networks from the bottom up;
• 7% of public servants are ‘high-impact learners’, their secret is clarity and planning.

Apolitical’s mission is to help build 21st century governments that work better for people and the planet. We believe that skilled public servants are the bedrock of effective governments, which is why we are focussed on supporting you, our community members, to connect and learn together.

In March, we launched the Public Servants' Learning and Skills Trends assessment to understand the state of learning in government. More than 2,000 of you took part across 66 countries, making it one of the largest global assessments of public servants’ learning and development.

This article shares what we learned from that research and how the insights are relevant to your career development. And given that so many of you shared your time — a collective 244 hours in total — to make this research possible, we also wanted to share what impact your contribution will have.

You can read about that at the bottom of this article, but let’s focus on the most important insights from the research.

Your informal learning is probably more important than formal training

Our analysis found that public servants rely much more on informal learning — like participating in peer groups or reading articles and independent research — than formal training to help them develop new knowledge and skills.

The graph below shows this in more detail.

The purple bars represent time bands of total learning each month — from the lowest (1-5 hours a month) to the highest (31-35) — based on participant’s responses. The black dots represent the percentage of that learning which was informal. As you can see, those with the least amount of time rely most on informal learning.

One of the key factors which causes this reliance on informal learning is a lack of time. Public servants told us it was (by far) the biggest barrier to participating in learning opportunities.

Learning is rarely ever an urgent priority but it is incredibly important, both for individuals and for their organisations. As part of the report we produced for governments, we encouraged them to make more time available, during work hours, for public servants to participate in learning opportunities. That’s a bigger issue about building a stronger learning culture in government but you can still take immediate action to maximise your informal learning.

Start now: Maximise your informal learning

If nothing else, this insight hopefully provides some reassurance. You don’t need to be enrolled on a formal course to gain new knowledge and skills. There is an extensive evidence base to show how valuable and impactful informal learning can be, particularly through learning ‘on-the-job’.

Taking on stretching work, chatting to colleagues about theirs, reading articles and independent research: these are all forms of informal learning that contribute to your development. What’s great about informal learning is that it can be highly contextualised to your specific role or area of work, which makes it easier to appreciate its impact. This lesson on informal learning, from our free course ‘How to Learn Effectively in the Public Service’, is a great starting point on why informal learning is so important.

Last year, Apolitical launched Communities to give public servants a platform to connect with peers, based on areas of shared interest or professional responsibility. We think this will be an increasingly influential way public servants learn informally, as governments try to address more complex, cross-cutting issues and the pace of innovation increases. There are great examples of how public servants can use communities as practical, actionable learning tools.

Collaboration is the essential skill for 21st cenutry government

One of the most striking findings from the research was how much public servants prioritise collaboration as a critical skill for 21st century governance. More than data skills, writing or even prompt engineering with AI tools like ChatGPT.

We know that silos are a frustrating reality that almost everyone in government experiences — in a community poll from January 2024, 72% of you said that you encounter silos ‘very frequently’ in your daily work.

More than ever, governments will need to get much more effective at collaborating. The biggest policy challenges of the 21st century — climate action, health, inequality — are the types of ‘wicked problems’ that defy siloed solutions from one team or department. It’s not just collaboration across government that matters, either. There’s a growing trend to embrace missions governance. The UK government, for example, is trying to address issues like energy security and social mobility through a mission-driven approach. That will take governments working closely with the private sector, academia and philanthropic organisations.

This trend toward more collaborative action to address complex problems will only increase, so how should public servants prepare themselves for this era of increased collaboration?

Start now: Collaborate from the bottom up

A great starting point is this article by Thea Snow, an experienced policy professional and now the regional director for the Centre for Public Impact and top contributor to the Apolitical community.

It’s a couple of years old but it captures the early sparks of a trend which has ignited across the global public service: bottom up collaboration. Snow argues that energetic, passionate and well-connected public servants can help shift the rigid bureaucratic structures which often constrain joined-up government. Another evidence point is the OECD’s ‘Skills for a High Performing Civil Service’ framework. It identifies four key domains and one of them is ‘managing in and through networks’. It includes many competencies which can flourish through the informal, bottom-up networks that Snow identified: networking, trust building, listening, being opportunistic and persuasive.

You can also get through this free course on ‘Silo-Busting for Public Servants' in 90 minutes.

This is what 'high impact learners' share in common

In our analysis, we identified a small group of public servants (7% of respondents) who said that their recent training had a very positive impact on both their job performance and career development. We call this group ‘high impact learners’.

The most important thing high-impact learners share in common is a high-degree of clarity about their priorities for learning. More than 80% of them said they were very clear about long term priorities for skills development in their career. By contrast, among public servants whose learning had the least positive impact, only around 40% said they were clear about their learning objectives.

You can see this reflected in the graph below. The learning impact score represents how well recent training experiences contributed to job performance and career development. The trend line shows how this score increases along with clarity about learning priorities.

Like other workers in the economy, one of the challenges that public servants have to navigate in the coming years is the increasing pace of technological innovation. The rise of AI in the workplace over the last few years is decisive proof of that. It means that people’s knowledge and skills lose their relevance more quickly than in previous eras, or that they need to develop new capabilities more quickly and frequently. In such a fast-moving environment, planning your learning is critical.

Take action: Create a learning plan

We acknowledged earlier in this article how tight time is with busy work and personal schedules. Therefore it’s important to make the most of the time you do have available for learning, so it’s as impactful as possible.

To get the most out of your learning, start by clarifying your priorities. What are the critical skills you need to succeed in your role? How might they evolve in the next few years? Taking time to reflect on these questions will help you focus your efforts where they matter most. You can do this reflection and planning collaboratively, through individual research, consultation with your line and manager and with peers from around the world on Apolitical.

There are lots of resources to help you with this planning:

• Here’s a template for an individual learning plan;
• We have a skills diagnostic for digital and data, so you know which competencies to build;
• And communities are a great way to ask peers about what they’re learning.

Your participation makes a difference

Since completing this research in July and publishing a report in September, after the UK summer, here’s how we are using the insights you helped to generate to support governments and public servants around the world.

• We have developed a series of recommendations which encourage governments to prioritise your learning and skills development.
• After carefully reviewing and anonymising the submissions, we published the assessment data as an open resource for governments and academics to use.
• We are using these insights to improve the quality of our learning design and delivery at Apolitical, including free content that’s easily accessible for all public servants.

Whenever we share these assessments with our community, we’ll always design them so they are immediately useful for you and governments’ capability building efforts.