This article is written by Micheal A. O'Neill, Lecturer at School of Political Studies, University of Ottawa

Sometimes it takes a crisis to underscore the importance of investing in public services.

Leadership at the top has come to define how citizens perceive the success or failure of their governments to deal with the Covid crisis.

However, responses to the pandemic show that it is the readiness of public services that truly matters to their success. And that requires careful attention to the skills that count.

Like many, I’ve spent weeks glued to the daily coronavirus tally on the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) dashboard. Within the numbers lies a proxy measure for public service capacity and how far governments have invested in acquiring and developing the skills of their staff.

I have researched the suitability of the content taught in public administration and public policy postgraduate programs to the actual workplace requirements of governments.

Focusing mainly on Canada, this work considers both the development of traditional public services skills as well as those associated with public sector innovation. I’ve observed that governments that invested most in the development of skills through training, development and recruitment practices were also those that demonstrated a high degree of effectiveness in their response to the spread of the virus.

In time, it is likely those governments that coped best during this period will be those that invested in developing the best skills within their civil services.

Public service skills

In most parts of the globe, the public sector is very often one of the largest employers — it could even be described as a labour market unto itself in most cases. As a consequence, the public sector has shaped the demand for particular skills, whether through its recruitment processes or through its training.

In the anglosphere particularly, public sectors have tended to recruit economists for policy roles, even in non-economic areas. Though they employ personnel from many different professional backgrounds, the traditional set of public sector skills has emphasised abilities in communications, research, critical and analytical skills.

Over the past decade, civil services have started shifting their attention toward the development of skills for public sector innovation. These reflect the availability of new tools of information technology, such as data analytics, but also the move towards a more citizen-focussed approach to policy and programs influenced by behavioural economics.

Assessing public sector skills in light of Covid-19

In 2017 the OECD developed a public service skills framework that combines elements of both traditional and innovation skills.The four skills areas in this framework can be summarised as policy development, procurement, service delivery and networking. Inspired by this framework, what follows are my observations about the public sector skills that matter most, and those that matter least, to how well governments have dealt with the pandemic.

Policy development

Policy practitioners typically need to be able to take knowledge of specific subject-matter and use it to move quickly from defining a problem to proposing a response.

The need to accelerate policy in response to Covid-19 merely highlights how important it is to have personnel with mastery of these skills. Covid-19 is also the first crisis where innovative methods and technology-enabled tools (such as big data analytics) were used to assist the process of policymaking. However, the capacity of governments to use these tools depended on their having trained their staff in these skills to begin with.

Procurement

One of the lasting images of the early weeks of the pandemic was that of shortages of medical equipment and the worldwide scramble of governments to secure supplies for health care workers and the public. In addition, governments were also seeking to secure space for quarantine and overflow hospital spaces. Thus, once governments made the policy decisions, implementing the decision required skilled procurement specialists to follow through.

This required specialised knowledge of international markets, supply-chains, and practices. With the possible exception of access to databases of suppliers and communications tools, technology-enabled tools likely made a lesser contribution in this area of pandemic response. However, recourse to innovative procurement approaches may become more common as government interventions stabilise and post-pandemic planning begins.

Service delivery

At the same time as governments were launching programs to support workers and businesses impacted by the pandemic and policy decisions such as the imposition of lockdowns, their capacity to deliver services was severely impacted by the mass dislocation of their workforce from offices to homes. It is an immense testament to the commitment of public service staff that governments were in fact able to roll out their support programs.

In addition to knowledge of the specific programs they are administering, service delivery staff require skills that include knowledge of administrative policies and processes, attentiveness to client needs and expectations and interpersonal skills, including the ability to negotiate and facilitate transactions. Here again, the speed at which governments responded to Covid-19 precluded the use of innovative tools and methods, such as co-design and co-delivery.

Networking

Neither policy development, procurement or service delivery can be successfully achieved without engagement across government and to actors beyond. In the case of the pandemic, this was demonstrated by the need for governments to work with partners international and domestic, including national and sub-national jurisdictions, international organisations, the non-governmental and private sector.

Where public sector innovation skills contributed to networking, they supported traditional public sector missions, such as public communications. Thus, social media and data visualisation as a key instrument for communicating with officials, other governments and the public. When public awareness is key to changing behaviours to “crush the curve”, these would be key parts of the pandemic decision-making and communications arsenal of governments.

Skills lessons from the pandemic

It is still too early to be definitive about which skills contributed most in the success of government responses to the pandemic. Yet, the skills which defined government responses were those we can describe as the traditional skills of public services: research, analytical and critical thinking, communications and networking.

Public sector innovation skills could prove critical too in how governments manage the post-pandemic phase. If the urgency of the situation called for immediate, broad-based economic stimulus, big data analysis will hopefully result in better targeted post-pandemic fiscal measures.

Looking forward, we can expect governments who supported their economies with mass injections of funding will be forced to make difficult fiscal choices in the coming months and years.

If the pandemic has made one thing clear, it’s that governments matter. If that lesson has been learned, we should see more development of public sector skills that ensure governments can face down the next crisis. — Micheal A. O'Neill

We want to hear what you think about this article. Pitch an article to us or send your comments to hello@apolitical.co

(Photo credit: UnSplash)