Learn about the technical skills which are most relevant and important to commissioning, designing, and delivering council services.
Introduction to the framework
This framework is in draft and is currently out for consultation. To provide feedback, please click this link to a short survey. We are especially interested in hearing views from:
- Heads of council services
- Heads of HR and Organisational Development
- Heads of ICT
- Cyber, digital, data, and technology practitioners in councils
To find out more about the framework, please contact [email protected] or [email protected].
How to use this framework
Heads of Service in councils can use this framework to:
- Understand more about cyber, digital, data, and technology skills, and how they relate to service delivery and councils’ priorities.
- Facilitate conversations with their council’s Organisational Development teams about their workforce needs, to make sure they have the right skills to achieve objectives.
- Facilitate conversations with their council’s IT, Digital, or Transformation teams about the kind of skills which would support their service or help to deliver its digital objectives.
- Help to define outsourcing, training, recruitment, or skill-sharing exercises for their service, to make sure that they are bringing in the correct skills.
Organisational Development teams in councils can use this framework to:
- Understand more about cyber, digital, data, and technology skills, and how they relate to service delivery and councils’ priorities.
- Forecast the council’s workforce needs, to make sure they have the right technical skills to achieve objectives.
The skills in the framework are closely related to each other, and councils will want to deploy skills strategically and in keeping with their local context.
This version of the framework focuses on “technical” or specialist cyber, digital, data, and technology skills. We have not included the skills which will be needed by the wider workforce, such as digital confidence and digital literacy, but these skills are important for helping councils to realise the benefits of digitalisation.
Skills in this framework
This framework contains 74 skills. Each skill has been defined in terms of its:
- Name
- The ability which it represents
- What it means for councils
The skill names and definitions have been chosen to align with the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), as this is a framework that is widely recognised by the CDDaT profession in the public and private sector. This means that Heads of Service can use the framework to identify skill-sharing opportunities across different organisations.
You can view the full list of skill families on the LGA website.
Linking skills to strategic objectives
Technical skills are important because they help councils to effectively and efficiently deliver their services and carry out improvements.
We have identified six digital and data-related strategic objectives which appear across many councils’ digital strategies.
You can see the six objectives, and the skills which are most important for achieving them, on the LGA website.
How we developed the framework
We worked closely with Heads of council Services, workforce leads, and cyber, digital, data and technology practitioners in councils, to understand:
- How Heads of Service wanted to use a skills framework
- Which digital and data-related objectives should underpin the skills in the framework
- Which skills were most important to include in the framework
You can read a more detailed description of why we produced the framework, and how we did it, on the LGA website.