Ashfield District Council and Dorset Council

Digital skills are key to enabling successful digital transformation for staff, customers and members.

Our hypothesis is that lack of digital skills, reduced training budgets, taking time out from the day job and procurement are all barriers to upskilling staff to deliver digital transformation.  And that by providing something that is open, easy to access, scalable and free or v low cost to use will enable services across local authorities to deliver digital transformation in an affordable way.

Dorset Councils Partnership are currently trialling their first Digital Academy, supported by Dorset Council CEO, Matt Prosser digital spokesperson for SOLACE. Academy spaces have been offered across Dorset with interest from neighbouring local authorities, CCG and private sector. Each course is oversubscribed.

The academy focuses on developing technical and behavioural skills for practitioners. We would like to partner as authorities with different starting points to develop this proof of concept. This would be delivered as complementary of offers e.g. GDS.

*Note that there is no commercial agreement in place or discussions at this stage with existing learning providers that have delivered sessions for the Dorset Digital Academy, therefore this information is potentially sensitive at this time.