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Governments around the world are seeking to leverage digital technologies and online platforms as a basis of service delivery improvement and innovation. The emergence of digital government – defined by the OECD as ‘the use of digital technologies, as an integrated part of governments’ modernisation strategies, to create public value’, is thus closely intertwined with electronic service delivery – with service performance viewed as an important determinant of not only government efficiency but also public trust (Roy, 2017). However, government’s performance in the realm of digital services has been decidedly mixed due to a myriad of technological, organizational, institutional and societal factors (Clarke and al. 2017; Roy, 2017; Clarke 2019). Within such a context, the importance of skills and training for public servants has been widely recognized (ibid.; Androsoff 2019).
Over the past two decades, technological change has quickened and created further opportunities and challenges for the public sector. The emergence of web 2.0, for example, brought with it participative and interactive venues such as social media that have incentivized governments to seek to leverage new forms of public engagement as basis of participative service design and the co-creation of public value. Mobile devices have further accentuated the emphasis on user-design methodologies while also creating new cleavages between traditional online processes (often via personal computers including desk tops and laptops) and mobile devices and channels. More recently, the emergence of smart technologies – notably artificial intelligence (A.I.) adds additional layers of complexity in potentially automating various aspects of service interactions on the one hand, while making usage of new sources of data-based analytics and behavioural insights on the other hand.
Across this rapidly evolving service architecture, public servants are called upon to design strategies, implement new systems and solutions, and manage existing and emerging forms of interactions with a diverse citizenry in terms of digital literacy and service needs and expectations. In such an environment, the public sector workforce is a critical determinant of service innovation and performance – even as one strand of the A.I. debate suggests that automation may ultimately supplement the human role in specific functions and roles. Accordingly, governments must ensure an adequate supply of skilled workers in order to design and execute smarter government in a way that is continually evolving. Skills development and workforce training are thus critical enablers of service innovation and public value, as is the functional roles required to adapt technological changes.
Within such context, the purpose of this article is to examine the skills development and training and development challenges confronting the public sector in an era of digitization. To investigate this challenge, this article draws on research conducted in collaboration with the Government of Canada (GOC) as an empirical case study, focusing on three key objectives: i) to examine workforce trends in terms of digital skills availability and deficiencies within the GOC at present; ii) to identify and explain skills gaps and inter-related workforce training deficiencies both present and anticipated; and iii) to offer new insights into the challenges of creating skills training and development capacities capable of underpinning an intelligent and adaptive public sector. While all governments are grappling with this complex problem, this article takes advantage of the unique data collected in collaboration with the GOC through the creation of a purpose built survey, and consultions with senior management to provide rich contextual data to help better understand and measure the digital capacity within the government, and links between digital skills and transformation.