Professional Skills for Government
Background:
In 2006 the FDA surveyed members attitudes to the ‘Professional Skills for Government’ (PSG) programme being introduced across all Government Departments, but only applied to those at senior levels who qualified for FDA membership.
PSG is designed to ensure that civil servants, wherever they work, have the right mix of skills and expertise to enable their departments or agencies to deliver effective services. The PSG involves a defined set of compulsory competencies that civil servants are expected to achieve.
Issues:
Specialists in FDA grades, which included senior government economists and statisticians, expressed concerns that some competency requirements, specifically ‘financial management’ and ‘people management,’ may not be appropriate to them. There was also unease over how ‘broad experience’ requirements would be defined by the 22 Civil Service Head of Profession (HoP), who held the task of determining if requirements has or had not been met.
FDA also had concerns around the links to performance assessments, and there were real gaps in understanding how the PSG framework might be used in shaping future career progression for those in FDA grades.
FDA Response:
The FDA response to concerns about the PSG programme was to launch the Professional Skills for Government Project in 2008, which was supported and funded via the Union Learning Fund (ULF). The project aimed to produce bespoke support to members in order to help their future career direction and to highlight and understand personal strengths and produce a plan to map out how those strengths could best be utilised to achieve progression and promotion of FDA members.
The programme comprised of 3 hour sessions, proceeded by an exploration of the career coaching programme on offer. It was designed to be flexible in order to meet the individual needs of members, whilst maintaining a realistic link with the PSG competency framework.
Embedding Coaching:
Through the ULF project the FDA used Opus2 to provide career coaching seminars targeted at specialist groups facing re-location and/or re-training. Opus2 was commissioned to run 3 focus groups to understand more about FDA members’ needs in relation to the PSG framework. The aim was to persuade the employer to take up this provision, following a feeling that the provision that was available didn’t meet the need of each and every individual employee.
The project has worked with private providers to deliver events, funded by the employer, to address barriers to development into senior levels of those in diverse groups. Our union learning representatives (ULRs) pointed out that there was an element of ‘fire fighting’ in their role and there was a need to engage at an earlier stage to tackle potential barriers.
FDA ULRs:
A network of trained FDA ULRs across the civil service has also been established as part of the project. An integral part to the success of the project was to recruit ULRs, as they are directly involved in negotiating around skills and learning with the employer, and to make sure members were signed up to the role of ULRs in terms of following up on outcomes and identify issues that members faced.
The traditional ULR role (interacting solely with potential learners to assess and address learning needs and skills gaps) would not necessarily be attractive to FDA members. The profile of an FDA member is someone who works at a senior level in government, advising Ministers or possibly even running departments themselves.
All those in FDA grades are potentially responsible for large policy areas or operational delivery. Since then there has been a great deal of informal feedback from members citing very positive experiences,
This work has been used as the springboard to embed learning and skills into FDA structures and in 2010 the union received funding for a further project which seeks to address issues arising from the recession, for those in FDA grades.
There has been a great deal of informal feedback from members citing very positive experiences of the ongoing work, including the following;
• ‘A very positive impact .at a very trying time during my career, helping me to decide how to handle my future work and development’
• ‘The coaching has had a huge impact.’
• ‘It excellently supports PSG development. Thank you so much!’
• ‘I would recommend it to everyone and I have got a lot out of it. Thank you.’
