Context
Public administrations across the EU need to ensure necessary skills, competences and capabilities on individual, organisational and system level to address complex challenges, and to deliver quality policies and services. Critical challenges include implementing EU policies/legislation and reducing administrative burden.
Public administrations often struggle to attract and retain qualified staff due to increasing competition for talent in an aging society, and the image of the civil service. Only 14% of EU citizens see their administration as an attractive employer, almost half see public administration as ‘complicated and burdensome’ and ‘slow in providing services’.
Outdated selection approaches and lengthy recruitment processes discourage well-educated potential recruits. Mobility across the civil service and between tiers of government tends to be limited. While upskilling and re-skilling of existing staff could compensate for a lack of new recruits to some degree, many administrations fail to reach the EU 2030 headline target of having at least 60% of all adults in training every year. A mismatch between public administration responsibilities and qualified people to do the job weighs especially on regional and local administration, which implement 70% of all EU legislation, 90% of climate adaptation policies, and 65% of the Sustainable Development Goals.
To ensure system capacity and professionalism, public administrations need to anticipate the long-term development of their workforce. Moreover, the increasingly complex priorities public administrations need to manage demands a rethink of conventional working methods. Building a highly effective civil service requires collaborating with stakeholders inside and outside government and navigating competing demands. Boundaries between public administration and external actors are becoming more fluid, when operating through hierarchies, markets and networks. Public administration needs to find the best way to ensure performance in such a context.
Objectives
The objective of the flagship is to support public administrations in Member States at national, regional and local level in their efforts to build resilient, attractive, transparent and high performing public administrations that design and deliver quality policies and services. A specific focus is on better systems and capacity for EU policy/law implementation. Flagship outcomes will help build citizen and business trust and reduce administrative burden. The flagship will support developing system capabilities, skills for the future and modern human resources management, in line with The Public Administration Skills Agenda of the ComPact.
Indicative Support measures
- Developing tools, systems and capacity for organisational development, knowledge and change management, to help build well-functioning and joined up government.
- Competencies and skills audits across current job profiles; including for example leadership, analytical, problem solving, collaboration, digital, service, technical and personal skills.
- Design and implement reforms to increase attractiveness, retain talent and increase the mobility, learning and career development opportunities in the public administration.
- Introduce cross-cutting competency frameworks (particularly for senior managers and on leadership development), thematic competency frameworks (for example for procurement, policy making, management of EU programmes and implementation of EU law, etc.), promoting their use for mapping of training needs, appraisal and promotion both horizontally (among national administration) and vertically (between national and local administration);
- Identification of learning needs based on the skills required for the future, including addressing the digital and green transitions, building trust and reducing administrative burden.
- Develop tools and methods for continuous learning, communities of practice, training curricula and capacity, including approaches for evaluation of training quality.
- Developing current human resources management practice, including through strategic workforce planning, staff surveys, tools and methodologies for data analytics, skills anticipation, workforce data, capacity for branding, communication, etc.
