Invest in modern skills and expertise
Better public services start with the right people.
Modern, user-centred services require skills that still aren’t widespread across the Welsh public sector – especially in user research, service design, content design, delivery management and engineering.
While there are small pockets of these skills, they’re often too small, unevenly distributed, and underpowered – sitting in junior roles without the mandate to lead change.
Some organisations that should be driven by these skills – like Digital Health and Care Wales – lack them at scale and seniority.
Pay and career progression for digital roles are uncompetitive and inconsistent between different levels of government in Wales. Digital and data specialists are regularly lost to better-paid roles in the private sector or UK Government departments based in Wales and across the border.
Wales has the talent. Our successful growing fintech and cyber security sectors show that. But we need to make government work feel like an exciting, meaningful and credible career path for those already here, and those in the Welsh diaspora who may want to return.
Change cannot happen without the right people with the right skills and capability, the powers to make change, working in multidisciplinary teams.
The next Welsh Government should:
A. Bring modern skills into the public sector
Transforming services means transforming how delivery works.
Welsh Government should:
- launch high-profile recruitment campaigns to attract user-centred design, engineering, and supplier management expertise
- form these practitioners into empowered, multidisciplinary teams who work alongside policy and operations experts to redesign services
- expand and scale the training currently offered through CDPS, enabling civil servants to gain hands-on experience with user-centred methods
Every civil servant should understand how modern services are designed. And every major delivery team should have people with the skills to do it.
B. Invest in career pathways and pay structures
Working in government should be an attractive choice for digital professionals. For this, they need clear career pathways and fair pay. The government should:
- create visible career progression routes for digital and design roles, from graduate schemes to senior leadership
- expand and support communities of practice across all digital professions
- review public sector pay structures to compete with the wider market, including the UK Government
These improvements don’t have to mean simply spending more. Our recommendations in this chapter propose new ways to fund digital delivery – by reducing duplication, pooling investment, and shifting from short-term procurement to long-term capability.
Where public bodies struggle to recruit or retain talent, the Welsh Government should step in – using its central role to host shared digital teams that can support multiple services across Wales.
C. Accelerate digital talent and embed leadership understanding
Transformation cannot succeed without leaders who understand it. To run modern organisations, we need modern leadership – grounded in the skills and mindsets that make digital change possible. It’s no longer acceptable for senior leaders to be unfamiliar with digital and technology.
Digital leadership skills should be seen as core to public sector management. That means:
- accelerating experienced digital talent into leadership roles across government
- requiring every public sector organisation to have a digital leader on its executive team and a digital non-executive on its board by 2027
- making user-centred design and modern software delivery training mandatory for all board members, executives, and the top tiers of organisational management
The Chief Digital Officer for Wales should be the Head of Profession for digital and technology across the whole of the public sector. They should have a mandate to bring leadership across organisations together to redesign cross-cutting services and deliver improvements.