Newsletter December 2022

Welcome to our December update, we hope this finds you warm and well. We’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has worked with us this year, taken part in projects, come to show and tells and training sessions, attended update sessions, and pitched for the Digital Transformation Fund. We hope to see you refreshed and renewed in 2023 for more!

Team News

We’re pleased to announce our new Head of Agile Delivery will be Lindsey Phillips from Powys County Council, who will be starting in late December. Lindsey replaces Jo Goodwin who left in August, and we’re really excited to welcome her to the team! We’ll have a blog from Lindsey in the new year about her new role and how she’s found the first few weeks.

Training

We’ve had some emails from people across authorities asking us about training courses for this year. We’re currently in the middle of a procurement exercise to procure training courses to hold in February and March 2023. We’ll have more information for you during mid-January about this and will email out when we have dates and times with links for booking – thanks for bearing with us!

Life Events Service Design Show and Tell

Our next show and tell will be Thursday 15 December at 11am – 11:30am. If you’d like an invite, email digitalteam@wlga.gov.uk.

Content Community of Practice

We held our first Content Design Community of Practice meeting on Tuesday 29th November. It was a really positive session with lots of ideas about how to grow content design as a discipline that we’re now looking to build on.

The next session will be on Tuesday 31st January, 11am – 12pm when we will be talking about standards, principles, and guidelines and how these can be captured and communicated in a way that’s most valuable for local authorities. If you’d like to attend, email digitalteam@wlga.gov.uk and we’ll send you an invite.

Latest blogs

Since our last newsletter we have published: Life Events Service Design: Easy to Find Sprint 1 Show and Tell, My first month as a UX Designer in Welsh Local Government Digital, Blaenau Gwent Service Improvement Project: Show and Tell and Content Design Community of Practice.

The Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS)

Knowledge sharing webinar: Recruiting Digital Data and Technology talent in the current Welsh job market, 15 December 12pm.

Digital skills are in high demand and it is acknowledged that the public sector is facing a recruitment crisis. It’s also an attraction and retention crisis with many layers.

After discussing the issue with the Welsh Chief Digital Officers, the Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS) interviewed a wide range of stakeholders across the public sector in August 2022. We grouped the issues they raised into themes that we could practically tackle.

Our next webinar will focus on recruiting DDaT talent in Wales.

• How do you recruit digital people into public services?
• What are the steps in your recruitment process?
• Are there any stages putting the best people off applying?
• Is your recruitment process accessible and inclusive?
• Are you losing candidates due to timelines or internal processes?

We will recommend:

• the most effective ways of doing things
• how to get the best out of potential candidates at the interview stage
• other best practice and guidance

We will also hear from Neath Port Talbot council on their experiences of trying new approaches in their most recent digital recruitment campaign.

Book here