Why write the Digital Era Competencies?
The first publication from 'Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age' is a list of eight Digital Era Competencies.
Our competencies attempt to define, at the highest possible level, the new baseline skills all public service leaders should have regardless of their other capabilities, and regardless of their role in public service leadership.
To be clear, these are the skills we believe public service leaders should have now, not in the future. For along time the digital era was coming, but now it has unambiguously arrived.
This invites an obvious question: why start with a list of competencies? There are two key reasons.
To help educators in universities and governments to update teaching
As a group we want to encourage universities and government academies to teach current and future public servants a selection of additional, new skills that they, most probably, do not teach at the present time.
To have any chance of success we need to be realistic about the ways in which both universities and governments choose what to teach.
The lingua franca of these internal debates on ‘what’s in’ and ‘what’s out’ is often competencies. These are high level descriptions of what a student is supposed to be able to do once they have undergone some sort of education - normally a course or programme. For example here are some competencies from real MPP & MPA programmes:
"Understanding democratic institutions and processes, and acting ethically"
"Managing financial, human and information resources in public and nonprofit institutions."
"Applying economics and statistics concepts to public management problems."
The adoption of a new competency by a university department or government academy can justify the restructuring of whole courses. A glance at the three examples above will tell you that each represents a lot of different knowledge and expertise, which has to be delivered through months or even years of teaching.
Universities use competencies as a kind of self-check: they help to ensure that new ideas for novel classes or novel syllabuses all add up to a strategic priority that the university has decided matters.
We felt that in order to make a case that universities should make space in their public administration teaching for new skills, it was important to frame the critical missing skills using the language and norms of competencies. This is why we took the considerable time and effort to develop the competencies in the form you can see them on this site. We have also developed a set of eight matching explanatory essays, which you can access from that same page.
Note: whilst some of our competencies will appear quite novel to university decision-makers, others are extremely similar to competencies presently in place. Where new competencies are similar to old ones, this represents us signalling that updating of current syllabuses is required (as opposed to the creation of whole new modules).
Also, to keep ourselves on track
'Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age' will offer the most value to educators if it is clear, focused and knows its purpose. The competencies will serve as a north star for the team working on the project, helping us to avoid wandering too far from the core disciplines.
As such our competencies are a bit like the story of Odysseus during his encounter with the Sirens. They are ropes to tie us to the mast and stop us being tempted to wander into waters that we should steer clear of.
How were the competencies developed?
Despite the fact that all 8 competencies easily fit on a piece of paper, they took several months of discussion and dialogue to develop.
The challenge was this. We needed to agree on what aspects of digital-era capability were truly essential for all public service leaders to have, versus those that were 'nice to have'.
To ensure that we achieved enough breadth we took several steps:
We interviewed several teachers and practitioners in digital government topics from different countries.
We analysed about a dozen masters level teaching curriculum, finding points of commonality and difference.
We held a series of iterative workshops, around half a dozen, in which drafts were designed, iterated, and improved to the point that they were ready for publication.
Is that it? Are these competencies written in stone now?
One of our Digital Era Competencies is about the critical importance of iteration. As such we would be hypocrites to publish a set of competencies and say 'This is perfect'. We expect to review the competencies on a regular basis, and expect most to have had some degree of revision within a year.