This article was written by Nick Walker, Deputy Director in the UK Cabinet Office’s Civil Service HR Directorate.

The UK Civil Service has been through a period of unprecedented change over the past decade.

From responding to the global economic downturn and ensuring that key public services keep delivering, to more recently preparing the UK to leave the European Union, you can imagine that “challenging” is a word we have been using a lot. Not least to describe all manner of situations that we’ve encountered over recent years, as we help the government of the day to develop and implement its policies as effectively as possible.

I want to share with you the adventure I’ve been on in recent years, and get your thoughts on how we can make learning in the UK’s Civil Service even better.

I am the Deputy Director for Learning Delivery, working at the heart of the UK’s Civil Service HR in the Cabinet Office, where we are responsible for helping to coordinate the strategic direction of learning across the Civil Service. The culture of the Civil Service is diverse — we employ around 430,000 civil servants across the UK and overseas, in over 100 organisations.

Civil servants support the government of the day to develop and deliver its policies as effectively as possible. The work civil servants do — from delivering crucial front-line services direct to UK citizens at home and abroad to policy development and implementation — touches on the day-to-day lives of everyone in the UK. It is a 24/7 organisation, with employees both in the UK and abroad, many of whom are shift based.

Becoming a learning organisation

Many of us have been involved in debates over recent years about how learning can be part of the solution to the diverse and rapidly emerging operational and policy challenges organisations face.

We in the Civil Service are no different, and I’ve been working with colleagues to set out our strategy and transform the Civil Service into a brilliant learning organisation. Why is this important? I’ve already outlined the challenges we are facing, as we need to create and normalise a culture where everyone is engaged with their personal and professional development; if we don’t, our organisations, our people, our skills, and us too, will go the way of the dinosaurs.

Therefore, earlier this year, I worked with a group of colleagues, all of whom are equally passionate about creating a great learning culture, to answer the question: if the Civil Service has a culture of learning, what would we see, feel and do? And what did we find out? There are significant blockers that are getting in the way of us being brilliant. let’s have a look at two of them:

  • Our people said that all too often learning is seen as a remedial activity that happens when something has gone wrong; we need to change perceptions so that our people see learning as developmental growth;
  • Our people said that they learn in isolation and that learning is not celebrated; we need to create a safe environment to foster a culture where we become more comfortable with taking risks, and work collectively, maximising the social learning opportunities.

We challenged ourselves to capture this rich insight in a new way and working with Skriberia, a design agency, we produced the graphic below to capture our vision for what the Civil Service’s culture of learning will look like:

were-building-a-learning-culture-in-uks-civil-service_asset_image1-1

And how are we using these ideas? The example of how we are building a learning ecosystem by curating a range of services to benefit the wider civil service is a good one. In our complex system, a single institution would not meet the needs of a diverse organisation or enable civil servants to develop the spectrum of capability needed in the modern civil service — we have therefore focused on developing:

  • the Civil Service Leadership Academy to support senior leaders to be truly effective in the unique context of government; collective skills and capability of senior leaders to lead in complex systems.
  • A Learning Expert Partner service work with professions to accelerate capability growth through specialist partnering on priority issues, coordinating professions engagement and implementation of strategic projects, and developing professions teams (including sharing good practice).
  • A new relationship with the commercial sector through which the common learning requirements of the Civil Service across professions and departments can be met; and
  • The Learning Platform for Government, an enhanced digital platform, allowing learning to be accessed anywhere at any time.

Putting people first

Now, let’s look at how we have applied our thinking to a practical issue — that of resilience and wellbeing. As a reader of Apolitical, you’ll know only too well that the pressures and challenges of today’s workplace call for different strategies and skills. And it's our aspiration to equip all civil servants with the tools they need to support their psychological wellbeing and feel confident in meeting the challenges they face, both now and into the future.

This, in turn, will build a more resilient Civil Service for we are at our most productive and fully engaged at work when we are healthy. And, moreover, this opens the gateway to better learning.

To help us all achieve optimum mental health, we’ve curated and sign posted colleagues to a range of available support — from our network of over 2,250 Mental Health First Aiders to our Employee Assistance Programmes and the various formal learning courses on Civil Service Learning, our Civil Service-wide learning platform. Through our annual People Survey, we get rich data from across the Civil Service that helps us develop future actions.

By taking a holistic approach to the subject of resilience and wellbeing and applying the learning organisation concept to it, we have delivered a strategy that shows we value our people, that will deliver better outcomes.

More to do

I am confident that we have now built some great foundations for our learning organisation and I look forward to exploring this with you at the next Future of Learning Show and Tell webinar. In the webinar, I will share more about the experiences of the Civil Service, and I look forward to tapping into the community’s wider experience of how to make sure that learning continues at times of considerable challenge. — Nick Walker

Nick Walker will share his experiences of becoming a learning organisation at Apolitical’s Future of Learning Show and Tell webinar on 15 October 2019. Click here to sign up for the webinar — it's free!

Nick Walker is the Deputy Director in the UK Cabinet Office’s Civil Service HR Directorate (CSHR). CSHR leads on building the workforce of today and tomorrow, helping departments and professions build a modern and effective Civil Service. Nick is responsible for delivering high quality, impactful learning across the Civil Service that empowers organisations, teams and individuals to develop the skills and behaviours needed to shape a Brilliant Civil Service.

(Picture credit: Unsplash)