Announcing the winner of the GIG Awards 2022

 

At the end of August we announced that the winner of the GIG Annual Award for 2022 is the cross-government team who worked on the refresh of the GKIM Skills Framework. 

 

The Department for Education (DfE) acted as the Lead Department with Working Group members from across a wide number of government departments in England, Scotland and Wales. The DfE project team comprised of Philip Humphries, Mark Camilletti, Sam Gregory and Jane Armstrong who were supported by a wider Working Group of KIM professionals from over 20 Government departments, including: BEIS; Cabinet Office; Competition & Markets Authority; College of Policing; Dept for Culture, Media & Sport; DEFRA; DLUHC; DSTL; GCHQ; HMRC; Home Office; Intellectual Property Office; MoD; National Crime Agency; Public Health England; Scottish Government; and UK Research & Innovation.  

 

The GKIM Skills Refresh Working Group embarked on what was clearly an ambitious and successful project to refresh and enhance the existing GKIM Skills Framework, which had become out-of-date. David Smith, Head of the GKIM Professions said of the project, said “This was a real exercise in Knowledge Management good practice, drawing on hundreds of years of collective KIM experience”.

 

The DfE project team began with the static version of the GKIM skills framework, which had last been updated over five years ago. There are six job families within the KIM profession and, over the course of six months, the Working Group revised and added 137 skills to the Framework. It now sets out what skills you need to be a good KIM professional in Government. This framework is designed to aid KIM professionals working across government with their professional development but was previously held in a series of lengthy Word documents on GOV.UK, making it relatively obscure and difficult to engage with for most staff.

 

As well as completely overhauling the skills themselves, the working group recognised the need to use new technology to create a dynamic and interactive version of the framework. They worked with Comaea, using their competency management software to build a new version of the framework that staff could use to track their professional development over time. This allows staff to rate their own progress on each individual skill using bespoke software, rather than noting it down in a Word document version, which was cumbersome and ineffective.

 

The working group then enlisted the help of specialists from each of the six GKIM job families: Records Manager, Librarian, Knowledge Manager, Information Architect, Information Rights and Information Manager. These ‘sub-groups’ of the main Working Group then used their specialist knowledge to shape a new set of bespoke skills for their area, which included detailed descriptions of the skill (for example “Curation, preservation and archives management” under the Librarian group) and a set of example behaviours for each skill at four different levels (Awareness, Working, Practitioner, Expert, or “AWPE” for short).

 

These four levels within each skill and accompanying behaviour examples allow all GKIM professionals to track their progress along each skill (for example, to achieve Practitioner level on the Librarian skill above, you would be expected to know when to seek services providing advanced preservation techniques). Alongside the dozens of specific skills for each job family, the core working group at DfE created a set of “generic skills” that could potentially apply to any KIM professionals working in government (for example “Risk management”).

 

The exciting part of using the Comaea tool is that it then allowed the core Working Group, as well as the six sub-groups, to create a series of “job profiles” matched to the different levels in each skill. For example, an EO Records Manager might be expected to achieve “Working” level in a number of Records Manager skills, and achieve “Awareness” level in a number of generic skills. The Working Group worked with the sub-groups to create dozens of these job profiles using their experience in their area, allowing KIM professionals across government to see what skills they needed to “level up” on to progress in the profession.

 

Unlike the old “static” version of the framework, the new dynamic Comaea version also allowed the sub-groups to upload dozens of learning opportunities, and assign them to the skills. These could be any form of learning opportunities, from blogs and books to e-learning, courses and professional qualifications. These will allow KIM professionals to instantly see what learning opportunities are available, if they want to “level up” in any particular skill. The dynamic framework also allows this element to be added to over time, meaning that new learning opportunities can be loaded onto the tool as they become available. Over time this will hopefully create a rich and constantly updated resource that will be invaluable to the profession.

 

After completing the new version of the framework (which included adding hundreds of skills, each with their own “AWPE” levels, as well as dozens of job profiles and learning opportunities), the core Working Group undertook a number of show & tell sessions with different departments to demonstrate the tool, as well as several within their own department, DfE. These sessions outlined the work undertaken, and included a live demonstration of the Comaea tool, showing how KIM professionals could easily track their own progress against their current job profile and any job profile they aspired to. 

 

After receiving a lot of interest in the dynamic framework, the Working Group then collected details of departments interested in using the tool and liaised with them to set them up with administrator accounts on the Comaea tool – allowing staff from that department to add their own colleagues. This also involved producing short and engaging training videos demonstrating how to use the tool. The working group are now planning to showcase the tool at Civil Service Live and hope it will act as an example and exemplar to other professions in government in taking an engaging and exciting approach to professional development.

 

The GIG Awards Judging Panel agreed that this is an excellent example of cross-government working to enhance the structure of the KIM profession in government, engaging with colleagues from each of the six GKIM job families. The Working Group has clearly been innovative in using technology to create a new version of the Skills Framework which is less static and allows colleagues to track their professional progress and to easily find new learning opportunities. The project has been well disseminated through show-and-tell sessions as well as at Civil Service Live.

 

Many congratulations to everyone involved in this important piece of work and for, once again, demonstrating the value of KIM profession skills to the work of the Civil Service! 

 

The GIG Annual Award 2022 will be presented at the Group’s AGM to be held in the autumn. More details to follow. 

Karen George

GIG Vice Chair & Chair of the Awards Judging Panel