Building digital skills across government

Demand is rising for government workers with digital expertise. We’re helping the Australian Public Service respond to this demand.

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What we’re doing and why

We’re helping agencies across government raise the level of digital skills in the Australian Public Service.

Skilled staff are crucial to delivering effective digital services. But technology is always advancing — and so are the capabilities needed to transform services.

To keep up with changing user expectations, government agencies need to:

• attract, keep and develop staff with specialist digital skills
• improve the digital literacy of senior leaders
• make sure existing staff have access to the tools and resources they need to deliver better digital services

We help government agencies build digital skills in the following ways.

Online help and guidance

We provide guides and tools to help government teams set up, run and maintain a digital service.

Digital Service Standard training

We offer free training to help government teams understand and meet the Digital Service Standard.

Entry-level digital programs

We provide entry-level programs across the Australian Public Service for people starting their digital or technical careers.

The programs provide apprentice, cadet and graduate roles in government agencies.

Coaching and mentoring for women

We organise the Women in IT coaching and mentoring programs. These help women develop leadership skills and increase their numbers in digital roles in government.

Building digital capability across the APS

We have a number of ways to assist in building digital capability. These include:

• Capability Accelerator Program – CAP helps you identify skill gaps in your agency and then assists in creating a coaching program using your own skills staff to upskill their colleagues.
• Digital Marketplace – use the Learning Design Standards to design training programs that you can then source through the Digital Marketplace
• Career Pathways – read more about our career pathways work
• Agency engagement – we engage with agencies to help them develop their capability uplift frameworks and programs

All of this is supports and is supported by the Digital Professional Stream.

Agency partnerships

We form partnerships with other government agencies. We work with them to build or redevelop digital services. 

As part of this work we mentor and coach people working in government. We provide guidance and advice on service design, product management, content design, strategy, interaction design and user research.

Workshops, meet-ups and events

We run regular workshops and meet-ups at our Canberra and Sydney offices for people working in government. We do this to help agencies develop internal skills to improve government services. 

We also host guest speakers and hold pop-up events in areas such as user research, service design, interaction design, content design and so on.

Digital communities of practice

We organise communities of practice that bring together people working in government to share ideas, show their work, solve problems and explore best practice.

We have communities of practice for service design, user research, project management and content design.