Your persona
How do you find yourself engaging with digital strategy and working practices at present? It seems you’re pretty engaged and aware of what your government, department, or team are driving towards. Deepening your understanding of these objectives and strategies can help build up a comprehensive picture of priorities and maybe help you see how you fit into supporting these ambitions and initiatives. Thinking about agile working, you may already be thinking in an agile way or, depending on your role, be using agile techniques and methods. But perhaps there’s scope for expanding.
Similarly, considering how you’re currently engaging with digital tools and technologies creates opportunities for refining your skills, and this could even become part of your professional development. The most important thing is to recognise that while you’re pretty confident and comfortable now, this is a rapidly evolving area, so be proactive and take advantage of opportunities to learn and grow.
Build your skills and knowledge
Carve out time for professional development. Diarise a chunk of time each week where you can take an Apolitical course, explore community articles, or anything else that aligns with your motivations.
Explore your department’s digital strategy, or even go a level up and familiarise yourself with your government's digital strategy. How aware do you think your colleagues are? Hosting a departmental session where you explain and discuss the strategy with colleagues is a great opportunity to both connect with others and cement your own understanding.
Explore the digital services your department or government provide. Who’s responsible for these? Can you connect with them and find out more about how they came about or how they’re maintained or updated? Or, perhaps you’re already directly involved in these digital services. How might you explain them to other colleagues — or the public?
Conduct an agile audit — who’s doing what, where, and why? Can you build up a picture of how agile is used in your department? Where might there be opportunities to expand?
Create a community of practice
Pinpoint aspects of digital working that you’d like to develop your skills in. Make a case for how this skill development will contribute to overall digital working and objectives, and work with your manager (or a more experienced peer) to identify opportunities for training or other learning as part of professional development.
This could be an opportunity to network or learn with others about best practices in digital working. Connect with colleagues in other teams. It’s likely they’re facing the same challenges as you are. How could you support each other?
Digital Strategy and Working is a common Q&A topic on Apolitical. If you feel you can support the community, consider responding to what’s been posted. How can you get senior management buy-in for a digital-first project? is the kind of thread you might be inspired by.
Keep exploring
Apolitical hosts events with thought leaders discussing a variety of topics, including many focusing on digital work and strategy. Keep an eye out for what’s upcoming, and in the meantime, you can catch up on recordings from past events, such as: Digital fundamentals for public impact.
You might feel ready to dive into a piece of structured learning. Our Digital Fundamentals for Government course could be an excellent place to start.
Take some time to explore Apolitical’s community articles, and consider engaging with the article creator by using the comment function. Adaptive Innovation: Making responsive and agile practices sustainable in the public sector could be a good place to start.
If you’re looking for inspiration for structured skill development, take a look at our Learning Plans where we have stitched together disparate educational resources into rich, diverse, cohesive and enlightening learning journeys.
What's next?
Not sure if this is the right persona for you? This diagnostic and its suggested outcome have been designed for illustrative purposes and may not reflect your level of awareness or competency.
Find a guide to the statements covered plus the scenario questions here: Digital Self-Assessment and Scenario Summaries.
Explore the other personae using the links below:
Leadership:Digital Explorer, Digital Consolidator, Digital Trailblazer
Non-Leadership:Digital Explorer, Digital Consolidator, Digital Trailblazer
⬅️ Government Skills Impact Tracker | Digital and Data Skills Hub ➡️