Case Study - Plugging the skills gap – a collaborative approach

The seven district councils and Rutland Unitary Council, who form part of the Leicestershire and Rutland Improvement Partnership, are the first group of district councils in the UK to work together to assess their collective skills profile using JGP’s innovative Skills Portal.

The Skills Portal enables the councils to build up a skills profile of any worker and ultimately a profile of the area’s public sector skills base can be mapped out.  From this, skills gaps can be identified and plugged by working together to create a regional improvement and development plan, something that individually a small district council could not afford.

Blaby District Council’s Chief Executive and project leader, Sandra Whiles said: “The potential is limitless.  Ultimately we would like all of the partnerships 300 managers to go through the assessment process.  We would then have a very clear idea of our skills profile regionally.

“Once identified there would be opportunities for organisations to tap into each others talents pools, to share expertise through secondments and learning sets and to benefit through the economies of scale when buying in any training and development programmes.  It would also increase the opportunities for people to move within the public sector, so we don’t lose valuable talent”.

The partnership started when the seven district Chief Executives got together in 2004 to see what shared improvement priorities they had and how they could work collaboratively to improve service delivery across the board.

Three main streams of activity resulted: management development, which the Skills Portal comes under; member development and performance management.  Communications and leadership strands have subsequently been added.

Sandra said: “To me everything is about delivering better services. Management development is integral to this, so we have built on the Leicester City Council’s management competency framework to create a set of 13 management competencies for the partnership that would run through all we do.

“We needed a way to assess people by these competencies and as a number of small organisations we individually lacked the resources to do this through the traditional appraisal methods.  Some of us were already working with JGP on recruitment so it seemed a logical step to work with them, when it was suggested that the Skills Portal might be what we were looking for.

“JGP adapted the Skills Portal so it fitted our needs perfectly.  Individuals identify and feed their own skill set into the Skills Portal.  This is then verified by their managers and mapped against our management competencies.  With the first group of managers we carried out an assessment and identified skills gaps and development requirements within a couple of hours.  Previously this process could have taken weeks or months”.

The result?  Better managers, better trained and better motivated who can provide better services and are more able to cope with increasing demands and decreasing budgets.

And the collaborative working has brought other advantages.  Sandra said: “The fact that partnership working stems from the top is a great driver to people throughout the organisation to work across organisational boundaries.  Collaboration works, not competition and it is this that influences all that we do”.

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