(by Alessandro Capezzuoli, ISTAT official and manager of the Aidr professions and skills data observatory)
The word competence is at least as ambiguous and illusory as the word falling in love. For both it is difficult to define, even if, for the second word, George Bernard Shaw somehow did it, defining falling in love as an immeasurable exaggeration of the difference between one person and all the others. For skills, however, the question is more complicated. Firstly because, unlike falling in love, which projects the lucky ones into a state of dreamlike grace totally foreign to the real world, skills are exercised in a raw and superficial reality, as well as being evaluated, measured and judged by people at times. absolutely inadequate. Furthermore, unlike amorous exaggerations, the skills gap can be disproportionately large between one person and all the others. Measurement, evaluation and judgment, in reality, are also exercised for feelings, and this speaks volumes about the cultural and moral depth of a society in which everyone feels authorized to evaluate, measure and judge others, compared to any field of knowledge, with an exaggerated rigor when compared with the indulgence that is applied to oneself.
The PA, unlike the private sector, in which personnel training and selection personnel play a very delicate role, uses mechanisms for selecting, assessing and identifying training needs that are at least bizarre. The qualification, for example, the ancient Italic piece of paper, the one that "a graduate counts more than a singer", to put it in the words of Guccini, is still considered the main pass for access to the public competition and to the careers that "matter". In addition, it is, (or should it be?) The proven test of the competences possessed by the candidates, which relieves the committees of any responsibility, freeing them from the burdensome task of investigating the life path that each individual took when he left the university desks and that probably enriched him at least as much as his studies. The role of those involved in training and human resource management is therefore essential for the adoption of paths aimed at increasing the digital skills set of public workers. It is necessary to know in depth the work processes, the technologies adopted and the individuals, in order to implement truly effective measures that can be spent by workers. It must be said that, very frequently, the areas that deal with managing the human resources of a public administration are made up of a few people with clear ideas, often surrendered, disheartened and set aside, and many people with ideas confused, in search of visibility, glory and careers, who probably arrive at the personnel office by mistake, out of fatigue or because they have not found a better location. This aspect, where human and relational skills are scarce, makes the application of any provision regarding digital skills very complex. Civil servants who acquire new skills, of any kind, should have benefits that are not always obvious. Benefits in terms of the possibility of growth within the organization and tangible improvements in the performance of work. All this, in many PAs, is not possible. It is not possible because the perspective view of each public administration is limited by the institutional perimeter in which it operates. It is not possible because the perverse mechanism through which careers, glory and visibility in the Public Administration are built is not at all associated with the merit and skills possessed, rather it is built starting from the formalization, in the form of resolutions that can be spent in competitions, of some kind of assignment, even the most insignificant, of some publication, even the most insignificant, and participation in commissions and working groups, which are now more scenographically called control rooms or task forces. In short, making a career is a real job in the work that absorbs almost all the energies of the workers. The expectations placed in the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR), therefore, are subordinated to the (mal) functioning of a machine with a few right gears being made to work the wrong way and many wrong gears working wrong. The lack of digital skills is not only associated with the speed with which technology moves and the inability of public workers to follow changes, but it is the result of a system that over the years has disinvested in culture and sharing, favoring individualism and competition. In a recent interview, the Minister for Innovation and Digital Transition Vittorio Colao made the following statement. “We all know that there is no true innovation without profound skills: in the absence of these, investments cannot take off, the modernization of the PA will remain at stake, the education system cannot become an engine of social promotion. First of all, we want to bridge the digital and competitive gap between Italy in Europe, thanks to a profound cultural change of method.
It is not correct. We should all know that there is no real innovation if there is no deep shared culture. Changes of any kind, even pejorative ones, always have a solid cultural basis. Skills are a consequence of a cultural path that training can only perfect. To really change public work, it is necessary to change the culture of work, making the most of human resources, starting with management. The Public Administration is made up of several very different souls. There are some excellences, large and small, in which the cultural level is very high and many marshy administrations in which detecting training needs is complex due to lacking organizational processes, inadequate infrastructures and poor vision on the part of the top management. A few years ago, naively, I had developed the belief that to bridge the digital cognitive gaps and detect training needs in the PA it was enough to apply two models of representation of skills, Syllabus and ECF 3.0, to measure the level and plan training. Both models propose a measurement system through the detection of some dimensions that can represent the level of digital skills of public workers. The dimensions can refer to the autonomy, the complexity of the tasks performed, the behaviors or the cognitive domain of individuals. Through the combination of these components, it is possible to evaluate the set of basic and specialized digital skills and implement the most appropriate digital training policies. This in theory. In practice, when I found myself teaching public administration workers “how to do it”, I understood better the impossibility of applying generalized scientific methods. First of all, because to make any measurement you need to be clear about what to measure and how. In an institution of a few hundred employees, there are:
- different areas (administrative, production and technological)
- different technologies
- different processes
- different work organizations
- different personal experiences
- different generations
- different wills
- different reasons
- different interests
- different cultures (and subcultures)
- different points of view
- different executives
In short, the most representative word of the public administration is not "digital" but "diversity". Propagating some magic potion that transforms the word diversity into digital, albeit in a well-made PNRR, is pure demagogy. To implement a digital training plan in the PA, it is necessary to proceed in a double direction: on the one hand there are the diversities and needs of specific digital skills for individuals, on the other there is the collective digital culture. And the two follow totally distinct channels; : one thing is to create the fabric of a new culture, another is to train a resource to use a spreadsheet or to configure a firewall. Whenever I have worn the shoes of a teacher, these two needs have emerged strongly: workers want to know the vocabulary, technologies and possibilities offered by digital transformation, but to conduct daily work more effectively they need specific courses. Courses that in the vast majority of cases refer not to a "generic digital", but to specific themes functional to the technological and organizational choices of the administration. Unfortunately, the generational intertwining does not help much to untie these knots. The workforce close to retirement is often disinterested in growth opportunities, while the new generations have digital skills more related to the use of devices and social applications than to the products, methods and languages of the digital world. Young people, together with middle-aged workers, very often learn in the field the skills necessary to carry out the work, sometimes they are even trained through courses that have no applicability to daily activities and that represent more than anything else a loss of time and energy. It is precisely from the diversity mentioned in the previous lines that we must start to face the digital challenge. In this, the famous 5W rules, deriving from Anglo-Saxon journalism, can help, at least to divide a public administration into homogeneous subsets and plan targeted training. Who are the public employees? What kind of business do they carry out? Where do they work mainly? When do they carry out their work? Why do they need to acquire digital skills? Answering these questions means knowing in depth the human capital and the placement of workers within the PA. And knowledge is the basis of any type of competence, even that of decision makers.