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Government supports the Skills Strategy at Public Sector Skills

1 December 2008

Ian Watmore, DIUS Permanent Secretary and member of the Government Skills Board, spoke at the Public Sector Skills 2008 conference on 1 December 2008.

As Civil Service Apprenticeship champion, Ian Watmore's speech focused on the progress made by Government Skills and government employers on delivering the Government Apprenticeship Pathfinder. He shared the progress the Civil Service has made against the Skills Strategy and some of the highlights along the way.

Launched on 1 April 2008, Building Professional Skills for Government is the first skills strategy for all of central government. “It's an ambitious first strategy to reshape everything we do up skilling our staff,” Ian said.

The vision for skills in central government will lead to:

• a workforce in which professional standards define what we expect of colleagues
• a workforce which sees the careers benefits of attaining these standards
• better value provision of learning and development opportunities, secured through collaboration within government and with partners elsewhere

Good progress has been made in the first six months. Employers:

• have developed their skills strategies in response to the cross government strategy.
• have bought in to pathfinder scheme on apprenticeships and
• are starting to open up access to their own learning and development

“Employers across government are answering the call to build professional skills and improve and we are making marked progress on taking common action but we recognise we have much more to do.”

Notes to editors

1. DIUS and the Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) merged to create the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS) in June 2009. As part of the former DIUS, Government Skills became part of BIS from that date.