Roundtable: Recruiting the workforce for digital transformation (2024)

Social purpose could trump salary when attracting tech talent to local government. Nic Paton reports on the second in series of discussions held across the country.

One of the things that doesn’t come across very clearly with members of the public is that a private company generally focuses on delivering one thing, and delivering that well. A local authority, by comparison, has to deliver about 700 things, and deliver them all reasonably well on a very tight budget.”

That was the message from Allan Stewart, innovation and digital manager at Falkirk Council, at an LGC and TechnologyOne roundtable discussion in Edinburgh to discuss how councils can navigate the new digital reality, and not get left behind.

“We’re trying to deliver to so many different, complex needs across a wide range of services with one single digital platform,” said Marie Fraser, innovation team leader at Falkirk.

Within this, data remains an ongoing challenge, she said. “We’ve got so many different systems. How can you bring data into one single source? When you’re talking about waste and social work and education, how do you bring that together? It’s totally different functions.”

It was a theme echoed by Ian Owen, public sector industry director at TechnologyOne, who said: “Not in a billion years would you put a business together that looks like a council; it just doesn’t make sense.”

“For me, what it comes back to – and what I see a lot of – is there are often some really good front-end systems in place but then it falls down because there is not the support into the back office,” he added.

“It is how we actually transform our systems to join our services together, how we drive efficiencies,” said Derek Masson, digital programme and delivery manager at City of Edinburgh Council. “How we reduce manual typing and duplication. How we make our systems more accessible to ensure we are bringing both our workforce and citizens who need support along with us; that they have the right access to technology.”

Powerful recruitment message

When it comes to workforce and skills, councils needed to think about how they look from the outside – their organisational culture and flexibility and their career progression opportunities – especially to highly mobile tech-savvy youngsters, said Maciej Dokurno, lead officer (employability) at Fife Council.

“For people from the young, digital world, the way we work can look a little bit conservative”

Maciej Dokurno

“For people particularly from the young, digital world, the way we work within local authorities can look a little bit conservative compared to what their expectations are. Everything from dress codes to the flexibility of the environment, although that has moved forward since the beginning of the pandemic,” he said.

Even if local authorities are unlikely ever to be able to match the cash of the private tech sector, the opportunity to effect tangible change in a myriad of areas ought to be quite a powerful ‘sell’, said Mr Stewart.

“If we were able to recruit young people effectively and make the conditions good enough for them to stay, that could be powerful. If you work for private industry, you’re probably only going to be working on one area. If you work in a local authority, you can be working in lots of areas,” he said.

What did the panel feel were going to be the main ‘digital disruptors’ in the coming years, for better or for worse, asked roundtable chair Martin George, deputy editor of LGC. What opportunities, too, might this present to deliver better services for residents?

Mr Stewart raised developments in AI and automation: “We will all have to move with it, whether private industry or local authorities. The opportunities it can bring to use limited resources in a much more effective way will be immense.”

One challenge, however, is the exponential growth in data these new technologies are also likely to generate, said Mr Dokurno. “Then the challenge is how we process it, how we secure it; what actually we do with this data. Being so customer-facing, as local authorities are, and dealing with so many different things, I think this is going to be a massive challenge – whether we can actually cope with the level of data.”

Building communities of practice

Hybrid working has created security headaches, said Mr Dokurno. “At the end of the day, it is down to how people use the tools that have been provided for them, how they set up and use their passwords, how they share their computer, what kinds of devices are near them when they’re using council devices.

“They may have their personal laptop open up beside and be speaking to somebody else, or to an Alexa. To some extent, this has opened up another side of cyber security risk, which has to be managed.”

Asked for final reflections, Mr Masson raised “the commonality that we’re all dealing with”. He added: “We’re all in slightly different positions on this digital journey but we’re all, broadly, facing the same challenges.

“By working and sharing, collaborating, building communities of practice together in that local government environment, we could learn from each other’s successes and avoid each other’s failures,” he added.

Aileen O’Hagan, Tay Cities Deal project manager: digital skills at Fife Council, asked: “How can we work together as local authorities to address that knowledge base and skills base? Could we do some sort of graduate recruitment rotation around local authorities, for example? That is not outwith the realms of possibility if we all have the same skills gaps.”

“There is no reason we can’t collaborate more and there is no reason we can’t be a bit more entrepreneurial in our approach,” said Mr Stewart. “There is this mindset that we should sit and wait for when funding comes to us. But there are a lot of opportunities to change the way we receive funding; there is an opportunity for us to go out and look at different funding streams and manage that more effectively.”

“We’ve always said the person is at the centre of our discussion. That’s still the case, but also now data is at the centre,” said Mr Dokurno.