Early in November 2023, we asked just under 250 public servants in our community: What skills will be relevant to someone with your job in 10 years?
Nearly 45% of respondents chose digital, data, and AI. People skills was not far behind, at 38%; professional skills (12%) and green skills (5%) came in third and fourth, respectively. If we’d reduced that horizon from 10 years to 5 or just 3, the responses probably wouldn’t have changed much.
For centuries, public administration has been shaped by literary intelligence. Civil services — from imperial China in the 15th century to the United Kingdom in the 19th — rigorously selected and promoted officials with a flair for philosophy, classics, history and geography. In the 21st century, the intellectual landscape is shifting as our global society is transformed by digital technologies. Governments around the world are vying with the private sector to bolster their ranks of science, technology, engineering and maths professionals.
Recruiting coders and data scientists is essential, of course, but they are a small portion of the government workforce. The demand for digital and data skills is more ubiquitous, and the intensity is growing. Governments are under pressure to build this capability at scale and with speed.
There are shared global challenges in that effort and emerging examples of innovative approaches that can be adapted to different country contexts. This short report spotlights three initiatives from Singapore, Canada and the United Kingdom and explores the lessons other countries can learn from them.
Singapore got 90,000 public officers to complete a data and AI course. Here’s what they learned.
The Singapore public service is a world leader in digital government. Data is at the heart of its public service transformation strategy, and so is building data skills across its 150,000-strong workforce.
Since 2019, more than 90,000 Singaporean public officers have completed the Data&AI Literacy Primer course, developed by Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech Singapore). That’s 60% of the entire workforce. To achieve this, they’ve had to navigate some of the most complex challenges in spreading data capability across multiple departments. In October 2023, Apolitical spoke to Jason See, the senior director for data science and artificial intelligence at GovTech Singapore, to understand how they achieved it and what they learned. These are four key lessons learned from their initiative.
Lesson 1: Provide pathways for different needs
The Singapore approach acknowledges that there are different requirements and use cases for data in different roles across government. To help structure data training offers — both from the centre and individual ministries — GovTech Singapore has designed a high-level competency framework. See explains that the data literacy primer is pitched at the basic level for all public officers, and there are more advanced options at the different levels (shown in the competency framework below).
Lesson 2: Work flexibly with agencies
The mandate of the team at GovTech Singapore is to build data and AI capabilities across government. They approached this as a shared challenge with other ministries and agencies. That means creating central resources that others can customise and facilitating that process for them, for example, by highlighting specific sections of their courses which can be adapted to departmental contexts.
“We don’t take a top-down approach — you can’t force training on every public officer. We want all of the ministries to take ownership of this mission, our job is to support them. That’s why we created the literacy primer. It’s there as a flexible resource. Departments can adapt it to meet more of their needs if they want to. It comes back to understanding the most basic universal needs that all officers will have — creating a programme to meet those requirements and then departments can take ownership to provide more specific training.”
Lesson 3: Support continuous learning and community building
The literacy primer is designed to meet the most basic needs of public officers. However, the GovTech team have also built more in-depth training programmes that enable “business power users” — those who work most closely with data but are not specialists, such as policy and planning officers — to develop more advanced skills and connect with their peers on the same training track.
“We have the Data Champions Bootcamp for our power users, which has been running for over three years. This is a six-month, part-time programme. Officers spend half a day every week learning about more intermediate-level data science capabilities, like Python and R programming. __We’ve had 5,000 people enrol across 90 agencies; 1,500 have completed the six-month programme, so around 30%. __The participants can also be part of a community with other public officers. On Friday afternoons, there are virtual calls where people can dial in, ask questions and talk to their peers.”
The graphic below shows how the Data Champions Bootcamp enhances public officers’ skills from a basic to an intermediate level.
Lesson 4: Take a shared approach to monitoring impact
Monitoring and measuring the impact of large-scale, cross-government training initiatives is hard — how do you define the return on investment across such a large system? At a high level, the GovTech team focuses on monitoring outputs: how many officers are enrolling and completing the course. For measuring outcomes, they rely on departments to take ownership. Quantitative measurement would be ideal, but it’s not always feasible. Instead, finding high-profile examples of business improvements — which the central capability team helps to promote throughout government — can be a good way to convince senior departmental leaders that the investment is worth it.
“There is one graduate of the data bootcamp who was able to use the data analytics skills she learned to go back to her organisation and build a data dashboard, which gave them more timely insight into what was going on. We also had data champions from the Singapore Civil Defence Force participate in our annual data arcade tournament; they identified through better data analytics that they could tangibly improve their ambulance response time by reducing hospital turnaround time. Sharing these stories goes a long way to convincing agencies to send more officers onto the programme.”
Singapore offers an example of what’s possible when central agencies empower other organisations across government to take ownership of capability-building work. Providing a framework for different levels of user need, along with an engaging and flexible learning offer at each level, has proved highly effective. GovTech Singapore also does an impressive job of being a cheerleader for AI and data skills by sharing compelling stories to help build awareness of their value. Their approach to socialising learning, through competitions and nurturing communities, also helps to reinforce that awareness-raising.
Canada is the latest country to release a universal data capability framework.
A capability framework defines the behaviours, skills and knowledge a person needs to succeed in a role. In the last few years, several governments have published data capability frameworks designed to be relevant for all public servants, Canada is the latest example in this trend.
These frameworks are an important foundation for building capability, as a 2022 report by the Open Data Institute (ODI) outlines. It’s easy enough to say that ‘government needs to build data skills’, but without explaining what that means — identifying the specific knowledge, behaviours and competencies people need — there’s a risk that the rhetoric becomes vague and does not guide action by agencies. Furthermore, as the ODI report points out, ‘data literacy’ (they use this as a distinct term from ‘data skills’) is a broad term which can incorporate aspects of numeracy, AI, digital, technology, privacy and more. Without a consistent framework, capability-building efforts can become fragmented across government and lose some strategic impact.
A universal capability framework makes it easier for organisations to benchmark capacity, track improvements, and provide a more robust way to measure return on learning investment.
In March 2023, the government of Canada published a data competency framework for federal public servants. Australia published its framework in September 2021, and New Zealand produced theirs in 2020. All of these frameworks take a more detailed approach than the Singapore example provided earlier — they specify multiple domains of data competence and provide descriptions of proficiency.
These are some key points of comparison and similarity.
Comparison of data capability frameworks: New Zealand, Canada, and Australia
Area New Zealand Canada Australia
Proficiency levels Includes profiency levels for each competency. Focus on innovation and improvement at the most advanced level Includes proficiency levels for each competency Includes proficiency levels for each competency
Structure Organised according to the data lifecycle Uses four high-level categories for organising competencies Organised according to the data lifecycle
Scope 25 competencies 13 competencies, emphasis on data ethics, privacy, governance, and sovereignty 26 competencies
Data Culture Emphasis on data as a strategic asset in planning and execution Links data to modernisation and delivering public value Data literacy as part of organisational culture
Tools Includes a questionnaire for evaluating proficiency levels N/a N/a
Scroll through overviews of the respective frameworks using the interactive graphic below.
The UK bets big on 'One Big Thing'
A consistent challenge in learning and development is prioritisation. Getting busy public servants to prioritise the time to learn or budget-holders to sign off on the commitments (both in time away from work and money spent on learning). The wider ecosystem of messaging and incentives plays an important role. Public servants at all levels need to hear and see developing data skills prioritised and rewarded.
That insight informs the UK’s current approach for two key initiatives:
The first is a strategic commitment, announced in June 2022, to train 90% of its 6,000 most senior leaders in digital and data skills within a three-year period. (As part of this effort, the UK government also published a digital, data and technology essentials framework for senior leaders.) Apolitical, along with the London School of Economics, Central Digital and Data Office and EY, is supporting the delivery of this commitment through the Digital Excellence Programme.
The second initiative is the ‘One Big Thing’ programme, launched in September 2023. Over a three-month period, every single civil servant is expected to undertake a day’s worth of data training.
The One Big Thing initiative is a bold approach to prioritising key reform initiatives. The scheme has received enthusiastic and consistent backing from the most senior leaders in the UK civil service, which helps send a clear signal across the system that data skills have special significance. Beyond the one-day training, this can help influence civil servants’ professional development choices and unlock more investment in this priority from departments. With large-scale awareness campaigns, timing matters. Simon Case, the head of the UK civil service, has used the Covid-19 pandemic and the rise of AI as a powerful backdrop for why data skills matter now more than ever.
How is your organisation tackling data skills?
If the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated the pace of digital change in government, the explosion of AI has put it into overdrive.
At Apolitical, we are thinking deeply and working closely with government organisations around the world to understand the new knowledge and skills public servants will need to transform government for the 21st century. That includes empowering thousands of UK senior civil servants to lead in the digital age through the Digital Excellence Programme, as well as preparing 10,000 global public servants for the age of AI through our Government AI Campus.
If you're thinking about how to equip your team for this change, you can get in touch with Katherine Weber (katherine.weber@apolitical.co), our Director of Partnerships, to hear how we could support you.
If you have feedback or insights to share after reading this report, please contact Jesse Samasuwo (jesse.samasuwo@apolitical.co), our Government Communications Manager.