The impact of Digital Transformation in the Public Sector

All right, I'm gonna start then, guys. Cool. So, this year has been a really exciting year for um public sector technology, at least I think so. Uh especially with the um the production of the blueprint for modern digital government. And that really lays out a a roadmap for where the government wants to do with um with public sector uh technology. And one of the big priorities in that is about elevating leadership and um and investing in talent. And I think that's really incredible. And we're here today uh with two wonderful panelists to really dig into that a little bit more and to explore that. And I just want to give one quote from the blueprint that I think is really uh really striking. It says change won't happen without the right people with the right expertise working at the right levels in multiddisciplinary teams. We need greater technological literacy at the top of public sector organizations to ensure that digital is not an add-on but a core skill set across the public sector. So I think we're going to we're going to dig into that a little bit more with our panelists today. So really pleased to welcome uh Carl Hoods CBE congratulations and the CDIO for DESNES and TEIT. And we also have Oliver Hester who's the head of public sector at FDM group and also a member of tech uh tech UK's skills and diversity council. So welcome both. Thank you. Thank you. Uh we're going to just jump right in and uh really in thinking about uh public sector digital skills. It's a challenge that's not really new. It's not I mean you know the blueprint is focusing on it but it's been around for a while. Why can't we crack it? like what what what is it that's stopping us from really getting our hands around this challenge? So, I think it's in some ways it's not just the public sector that has the part of the challenge. Yeah, I'm a non-exec in in a number of different organizations and I'm pretty much the lone digital voice in a room full of accountants which always kind of makes me think about you know technology plays such an important role in any organization why aren't there more digital folk on that kind of board level. So I think it's a similar sort of pattern that we see in the public sector uh to some degree or those strides are are being made. So I think it's a it's a multi- level issue that we've got. Everything from early talent through to kind of senior talent um is something that we're trying to tackle with and we all seen the stats about then the kind of talent pipeline and the number of people and vacancies that that we need. So I think we just got to try and tackle it in multiple levels. Uh there isn't a one-sizefits-all type approach to this. So I think we're we're doing good things inside the organization that we're in. There's always more that we can do, but I think it's, you know, partnering with with people like Ollie and FDM which kind of help us on that journey as well to think about what we can do next. Amazing. Anything else you think, Ollie? Yeah, I do. Um, I think Car's absolutely right in reinforcing that message that there's a UKwide digital skills gap and that applies both to the public and private sector and in my seat with FDM. We're engaging with 200 plus clients that will come to us with similar challenges around attracting and retaining digital talent. I think um in the context of the public sector, there's probably further limitations in terms of potentially around salaries and what they compare to in terms of the private sector. Although there have been great strides in terms of developing um digital data and technology teams and allowances from a payment perspective to help support that. So yes, there are gaps but there's strides that being made and I think it's been it's about as K was saying that sort of multi-layered approach to bringing in different levels of talent and finding ways to pipeline at that earlier age with a longer term view as well. Yeah, I think in tackling that, you know, that that issue and perception of of salaries, which is which is real to a degree, but I think had the same challenge when I worked in the not for-p profofit sector. I think there it's as it's as much about the kind of environment you'll be working in and then the outcomes that you'll be achieving in the cause. And I think we're finding some real success in both that look, we we're dealing with cutting edge technology, emerging technologies, and we've got a great story to tell in terms of the organizations that we support because we support multiple um that if you're interested in energy and climate change, then well, great. We've got a whole host of projects that you can be involved in seeming. Also, if you're interested in science, innovation, and technology, we've got, you know, loads of activity in that sort of space. So, there's something about the storytelling as an attraction mechanism. And then from a retention piece, we've invested quite heavily in terms of our learning and development. We've got our own HR team in in our digital function which is solely focused on that culture uh embedding that culture of inquisitiveness and building that into our own team as well as infusing that into the rest of the organization. And I think there is something there that we can do more of across government. If we look at the the kind of digital skills at a senior level and in the pipeline as you progress at the moment we've got this slight tension it feels between established schemes that exist for civil servants to go on and then we have digital as an adjunct. So if you're faced with a decision about do I go on this course or do I invest in going in another you're likely to go with the ones that have been tried and established civil service type course like FLS and SLS and MLA and all those others that exist. So for me, you know, why can't we add more of the digital skills into those existing programs so we're not creating a barrier for entry for people and it just becomes part and parcel of everybody's day-to-day job. Oh, that's really interesting. I think um one of the things that you said really drives home the point that salary is just one aspect of pay, right, of of sort of what you get from your job. And I think when we think about like um that sort of attracting and and retaining talent piece, what sort of what is it? How do we draw more out of that aspect um to really attract and and and retain the right people? So I say it's part of the it's part of the storytelling. So that starts with our job descriptions and our adverts. Um and then just how we engage with people through the process. So, you know, we tend to have uh open days, although be it virtual. So, it's a chance for prospective candidates to kind of meet the team that they might be working with, ask questions, answer that in a kind of group setting rather than necessarily get worried about, you know, how can I ask all these questions during interview just so that we can make it easily accessible. Um, and then it's about, you know, the work that we're doing, examples of projects that we're engaged with, but also the opportunities for learning and development, the sorts of technologies that we provide. And for us, I think we've got an even better story in that we're providing technology services to multiple departments. You know, at recent count, we've got 13 organizations relying on us for their technology with more to come. So again, that's a that's another opportunity for them to gain experience on a more broader level. Um, so I think it's about, you know, trying to figure out what it is that will be attractive to different people at different stages of their career and then how do we match what we're offering with that sort of cohort or that that kind of demographic. Um, but it's a constant evolution, which is why we've got, you know, we've made the investment in the team internally to kind of help us through that journey. Amazing. Yeah, I'd echo a lot of that sentiment. I um have deployed 3,000 people into the public sector over the last 10 years into digital careers. And a huge part of the work that I've done is and with many others is to tell the story about the purpose behind some of the work that's going on in the public sector. You know, during the pandemic, for example, talking to people about the opportunity to be involved in test and trace from a digital perspective is a fantastic opportunity for people that attach a lot through their work and in the opportunity to support other people. And I think now more than ever, there's a generation at a younger level that are more interested in that opportunity and places like working with Carl and his teams from a sustainability perspective is is really interesting. So, um, yeah, echo some a lot of that sentiment, I think. What about that retention piece though? I mean, in terms of like sometimes it's getting them in the door, but then how do you keep them how do you keep them there? So, again, an investment in in them as individuals as well as what we're doing. So, you know, we've had uh great success with placement students that are now coming back in the cyber world. So, you know, in my mind that they're really hard to recruit sort of skills and roles. And our expectation was if we can get some people in on a placement year um alongside apprenticips and other schemes that we've got that that would be a good way of them finding out more about careers in the civil service. But having known early talent career people in in the cyber world, invariably they're snapped up by the city, you know, kind of salaries that we just cannot compete with. But both of them have wanted to come back. And I think that's because they can see the breadth of the work that we're doing plus the potential for them to grow in the role. And I think that's what we should be doing as CIOS is investing in people. You know, my as I was saying, part of my job is to make sure people can go on and do the the next thing that they want to do. I'd prefer that if it was inside our organization, but you got to be realistic. People will want to progress their career. If we don't have the the kind of career pathway there, well, then they're going to move on. So we need to do our job in kind of, you know, upskilling people at all levels. So again, retention, you know, we invest in people. We've got a great learning and development offer. We, you know, we access online learning tools like Pluralsight and others, but we also leverage the relationships with our strategic suppliers. So you know, we're looking at becoming um effectively partners. We just signed a partnership deal with Service Now as an example, and that's so that we can get the same sort of level of accreditation as a private sector organization. So when people look at us they can say great they're they've got partnership status and we're exploring that with our other strategic suppliers as well. So that unlocks the kind of roadmap. It gives us early access to product. It gives us access to training materials that we might not otherwise get. It's all those sorts of things that we're looking to develop so that again people can tap into that rather than think have I got to justify why I need to go on this training course because we only get a budget of X per year. We've got all of that material freely available to us. Is that just you or is this like across public sector? Are you doing something special? Um we always like to think we're doing something different. Um I I'm not aware of anybody else having kind of approached the partnership uh kind of process and certainly the our strategic suppliers when we talk to them we're the first that are doing that in UK public sector that it happens in the states sometimes. I think we're large American tech companies but very rarely in Europe. Um I mean many other organizations across public sector have invested in learning platforms that kind of stuff. Um but I think we're starting to see ourselves more of a an internal managed service provider. So we're trying to put ourselves on that footing because we are providing services to multiple organizations. So um in that way we are different I think and we're we're always striving to do something differently. Okay. Okay. I'm gonna switch gears a little bit and talk about the thing that we always have to talk about now in any sort of setting like this and that's AI, right? So, um AI is kind of I I do you know I was thinking today it's sort of like it's in everything and also around everything at the same time in terms of like when you talk about AI and recruitment and that people are using AI and applications and things as well as you have to recruit for AI skills. So that's why it's kind of you really can't really escape it. It's everywhere you go. How can we ensure that public sector professionals are equipped with the sort of skills that they need to manage AI solutions? There are similar themes I suppose you know we've got um technologies we should be aware of at one level there are groups of people that you know don't need to know the nth degree of detail. I was asked a similar question the other week on a on a panel about, you know, do senior people need to understand technology to what degree? It's like they don't need to code in Python and write hello world. But I think at one level understanding the the kind of capability and what the art of the possible is is is definitely required and then as you move through different areas then a deeper understanding is required. So for us it's about how again how do we tackle that audience? what are we doing for training and awareness across all of those different different levels? Um, and that's, you know, we've got workshops planned and and kind of ongoing to kind of bring to life this is what AI might mean in policym or this is how AI might be used in grant management and services, that kind of stuff. So the real thing that we try to to kind of push is to to focus on the problem statement and the outcome you're trying to achieve and then we'll match the technology to it because I think we've all seen everywhere which you know kind of there's a technology AI blockchain metaverse whatever you know all in the pursuit of a problem well let's figure out like you know let's figure out what we're trying to achieve first and then we'll do the matching between AI and it's like you know even what do we mean by AI yes and somebody remarked the other month of, you know, we're talking about machine learning. Um, and they they class that as legacy AI. It's kind of like, well, okay, we've got to that stage already where the Gen AI is the thing that we're all focused on, but again, there's a there's a wealth of things that we're already using. Um, so I think it's about, you know, bringing that to life, getting people to understand what the art of the possible is. And then for us, it's also about how do we utilize the tools we've already invested in and I think that's what we're focusing on at the moment. we've got some great platforms that we that we use to to service our demand. We have to maximize the use of that and they're all having AI built into them and infused. So I think it's you know how do we really leverage that before we then start going on to think about other solutions and there may well be other things that we need to do outside of those core platforms. But I think first and foremost when we're looking at what we're trying to deliver a lot can be achieved with the technology we've already got. Makes sense. Makes sense. I wonder I always sort of go back and forth in my mind about like does the technology need to be easier or do we need to be more skilled in using the technology cuz I mean there will be there will be roles where you have to like where you're actually actively using the technology and and building it and and you know programming and all of that but there will be need for digital skills that aren't that kind of skills if you know what I mean and I think the government does this sort of one big thing program every year where they sort of get everyone skilled up on a certain aspect of of digital and does that like does the digital as does that kind of thing need to be easier or do we or do people need to upscale themselves if am I making any sense whatsoever? Yeah. And I it's it's a bit of both, right? So if we look at some of the things that we're developing, we we've t we're very much taking a product mindset to the things that we're delivering, right? So if we look at something we might want to do around grants and schemes, what we're trying to do is build a product based on a platform that we can consume like Salesforce or Dynamics or or whatever it may be. Um so we're trying to put that in place and then think about the solution the problems that we're trying to solve. How do we turn those into components that are repeatable? Um which we've got some great success on you know reuse of 60 to 80% of the components that we've built in some areas. The next level is well how do we then give that power and capability to people outside of the digital team which is where the kind of low code no code kind of stuff comes in in a controlled manner so it's not like the wild west and we've got people off building business critical apps without our knowledge. So there's that angle to it. Um and then I think there's just the general again back to back to skills. What is it that people can be inquisitive about? How can we provide them with some tooling where they can they can access and use like we're heavy users of Microsoft Office 365. The amount of applications that exist under teams that can do workflow that can do polls that can do all these different things we're doing more in terms of making people aware that they exist and that they can use them. And if they can service or think about their requirement by using those tools before they then kind of engage with us into a bigger project, well then that's great because we're kind of doing the discovery by actively using something. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's um it's interesting in inside of FTM we'll essentially train up to, you know, thousands of people across different technical platforms. And I think there's always sort of the baseline of what every consultant we would expect to have as a baseline of different levels of understanding around tech. And from an AI perspective, there's clearly just a standard user. And then there's the specialization of understanding how to use that particular tool across a particular discipline. So a software developer is going to be using AI in a completely different way to perhaps a project manager. And I think it comes back to that sort of understanding of how you can almost put people into pockets of of users and the way in which they should be potentially using that technology and setting out what that as is looks like today. Yeah. In terms of the opportunity within the existing estate that you have from a technology perspective and then where you can look to be in the future and plotting out what you want that to look like but probably with things like a and other things considering important things like ethics and data security and all that sort of stuff as well. So yeah, it's it's not an easy task. I I don't have you. No, I think and look there's the there's the technical skills which we can do at varying degrees. Although increasingly that's becoming more important to me is is mindset and attitude. So we're very much exploring and thinking about how do we take the product development mindset and take that into other areas of the organization as well as systems thinking because you know we're part of a broader system. So we're always encouraging our teams to think about you know if we're delivering a project for a particular policy area we'll think about how that might then interact with other areas of the organization or the other organizations that we're delivering services to. So we have a broader view. that way we can start to build a you know kind of more extensible richer set of products that we're that we're then using. Um so for us it's it's definitely is as much about the technical skills as it is about the kind of mindset. How do we solve problems in a different way? What's our approach to innovation? Can we really test and learn rapidly? It's all that kind of stuff that we've talked about for for ages that we're we're starting to implement more and more of. Yeah. I've um I was at um a conference uh a couple months ago and it seems like the the things are turning away from before it used to be human in the loop. Everyone's talking about human in the loop but now it seems everyone's talking about human- centered AI. So it's sort of like putting the people and the users at the heart of what it is and and it's the technology meant to service people and not people service the technology. So it seems like that is sort of the the new trend of of how people are thinking about engaging with technology and it feels very refreshing actually to be actually like yeah I'm not meant to serve the AI the AI is meant to serve me and yeah I think that goes back to that in some ways that technology in search of a problem. Yes. Right. Which is like we're in a rush to deploy technology because uh because it's the next big thing. It's in the Gartner hype cycle. We've not reached the trough of despair yet. So, let's try and do let's try and do something with it, which I think is like where we've got to hold ourselves true is to think about what is it we're trying to actually solve here. Absolutely. Which is the important thing. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of like I have this AI hammer now. Where's the nail? Everything is AI nail. I think we have to also think about the security aspect of it and cyber security is paramount in the digital age. How can we balance the need for innovation with critical imperative to protect sensitive data and maintain public trust especially when when we're talking about AI? So what do you think AI and security? What well in my mind one of the key areas and we've kind of been speaking about this a lot is around the training and education side. Um making people aware of how to mitigate some of the bias elements that can lend towards it and particularly in a public sector setting. Obviously, different departments are going to have different ways in which they really need to be considering data security. I can't imagine that the mod using AI is going to be a a good thing if certain information is shared with people that it shouldn't be. So, um and ways to do that. I'm I'm sure there's a number of different strategies that have been applied as various technologies come through, but probably comes back again to thinking about well, who is each what is each user group? How do we want them to be using this new technology? And then how are we ensuring that we're almost kite sealing approving that group of people to use it? And I always think with these things as well, it's like start small, pilot things. Yeah. Make sure you're doing it in in the right way at that stage and then scale it, lessons learned, take a bit of an agile approach. Um, so yeah, that's just some of my first thoughts on that. Yeah. Yeah. What are we do we think there's sufficient public trust in AI or are people still really skeptical and really um you know distrusting of AI? I think with all things trust a lot of it's around transparency. Mhm. Um I think if there's an opportunity for um AI models to be developed and then for there to be transparency on what that looks like with people at with the people, I think that will help to encourage um a position where people are more trusting of that. Um of course again in the public sector setting I suspect there's going to be challenges in terms of how transparent you might potentially be able to be. Um but typically I'd suggest that people have seen that with other technology advancements that's been a level of trust around that and that's typically you know end result digital services for for the people you know the passport turnaround is very quick for example and I don't think people are concerned around that as much although appreciate you know slightly different um parallel. Yeah. Yeah. No you're right. I think there's um there's this tension between wanting things to be really good and really fast and really efficient and then also trusting that the data is being handled properly and and so there's that sort of of tension. How do you handle uh things like security and and and data governance in your So there's standards uh policies, we've got governance forums, uh mechanisms that kind of do all of that. it's built in with you've got guard rails across all of the infrastructure and applications and services that that we kind of manage and I think it's about setting those and monitoring them. Um I think you know use of AI in in cyber you know your earlier question there is we use that both in the tooling for threat detection um and other activity because there's such a volume and we can never have enough people to trying to keep on top of that uh versus securing the AI applications that we that you know we need to in workloads to make sure that data is only staying within our in our kind of ring fenced organization as it were. um being really clear on you know how people should be using copilot uh chat GPT etc or not um and all that um I think there's there's some interesting tooling coming out at the moment for example to look at prompt inspection so that you know I guess the big challenge for all organizations is how do we really know what prompts people are typing into publicly available um generative AI solutions so the more insight we can get and start to layer governance across the top of that then um then that's the key thing. So it comes back to the standard governance principles. How do we then hold the standards to account and make sure people know what they they should be doing and how how do we make ourselves aware when something does go wrong? Um so uh so that's that's all you can do in this sort of space at the moment. I think advance is that quick and you know I ch somebody uh recently that said yeah they weren't too bothered about AI adversaries versus AI because there was so much work to do just basically for from a cyber perspective that most organizations public and private have got a long way to go to get themselves up to speed without worrying about necessarily how they need to start building more AI into their kind of defenses because the AI will eventually face off to AI and there will be this weird you know kind of dystopian kind view of robots battling each other. But, you know, maybe there's some truth in that. I don't know. Yeah. No, I think there's also this um there's a different appetite among different people for for their sort of risk and their um you know, how much they're ready to embrace AI or not. Um you know, my cousin said, "Oh, I was able to generate a hundred different photos of myself for like head shot that I can put all over." And I thought to myself, why would you want to do that? like that sounds a little bit risky to me, but um but he was absolutely fine with it. And you know, I guess that you have your um your innovation enthusiasts and those people and then you have your people that are naturally a bit more skeptical and reserved. And I suppose it's just reassuring everybody that, you know, having that right level of trust that you're going fast enough for the enthusiasts, but not too fast for those that are completely skeptical and are like, "What are you doing? this is my actual face that you're just like generating photos of, you know. So, yeah. Yeah, we had I had a discussion on this at one of the school boards that I'm on about, you know, how do we know when students are using AI? Do we let them use AI in in that kind of stuff? And I think again there's some, you know, there's some principles there around acceptable use, referencing your sources, that kind of stuff. I guess if there's a worry that I have, it's you are people blindly going to a chat GPT or students going to that and accepting the information they get back as fact and we all know you know the kind of hallucination problem and and others and that will be solved over time but I think you know we need to build in that kind of level of uh inquisitive like is this actually like how do I know this is this is real and not just an amalgamation of eight different things into one. Don't lose the critical thinking basically. Equally there are tools I know when my son was at university of you know there's plagiarism tools where they submit their work and it gives them a kind of uh 70% of this is dissimilar to somebody else's one which he actually did get pulled up on. But uh the interesting fact there thing there for me is like you know doing law there was a case study that they needed to do. There was one like reference case for it. It was a particular type of law. So most of the class had a similar sort of answer. Yeah. It goes through the plagiarism tracker and says your answer is very similar to somebody else's. Come in and have a conversation and then when you work through it all it's like oh well it will be the same because like the pool of information is extremely limited. So I think whilst there are tools that kind of help highlight that and it might highlight that in recruitment for example where we've had some very similar kind of uh personal statements come through etc. is like again that's the answer that you might get out of that might not be the fact. and say yes. I think this is where the kind of change in people's roles might might come. You know, it's it's less about replacing whole jobs, but more about changing them and enhancing them and accelerating certain parts, which may mean we need to go back to thinking about other skills that we need. Right. Interesting. I think if we um if we look at sort of the role of recruitment and it's sort of you can do lots of things through recruitment and it's sort of I think of it sort of like procurement you're buying the one thing but you're also doing a lot more than just buying the one thing and with recruitment um you can do much more than just hire a person you can look at sort of how do I make a more diverse workforce through my recruitment policies how do I help disadvantaged communities through my recruitment what sort of um how can we h oh I have this example here of digital hubs. So digital hubs are being proposed to foster local opportunities. How can hubs be designed um to effectively support people outside of London and create sustainable thriving tech ecosystems in regional areas? So, um, if we sort of consider how FDM operates and the experience that I've had here, um, we've been in a position where we've set up a recruitment function that looks to bring in talent from across the UK. Um, and we spend a lot of effort around trying to build a brand around the fact that we are inclusive by nature and support diversity. Um, and by doing that, we're able to be in a position where we start to bring people through into our business from lots of different types of backgrounds, whether that be exervices um, professionals. So, people from the exforces looking to transition into a career in the in in civy street as they would call it, looking at returns to work. So, people have left the industry to raise a young family, look after a sick relative, something of that nature. Um, and people that come from predominantly a lower social economic status as well tend to apply for for an FDM opportunity. Um, perhaps they don't have the social capital to enable them to have um the connections into the customers that we work with or potentially um be in a position where they can afford to upskill in a particular area of um technology. Um and where we've seen um what what we've been able to do and is is partner with some of these hubs with that talent where I think they are currently quite well attuned to the idea of supporting that type of person coming into their organization. I think um there's definitely been an innovation in terms of the way that they land and work with those types of people as well. um you know referring back to some of the things that Carl was talking about there's a greater um employee value proposition for them in terms of the online training that's available the mindset of the people that are around them that are really there to try and support them with their development in a way that is probably unique in comparison to say the private sector there's a real opportunity there to continue that throughput I guess the the challenge is the scalability of it versus the challenge of what needs to be delivered and making sure there's a balance of the right levels of capability to to get the job done but also fostering you know an inclusive talent development environment if you like. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we we recruit in multiple locations. So we've got presence in Birmingham, Manchester, Cardiff, Glasgow, um all over. So you know, our default is to advertise outside of London first, but then recognizing that, you know, we're in fairly competitive market that we might add London back in. But we're looking at how do we build communities in those different locations because it would be pretty soul destroying if you were the lone, you know, kind of software engineer in a location where you didn't have any team members and you were just spending all of your time on teams that doesn't kind of build that. We're encouraging people to to to come together and we've tried all the other schemes and we use the kind of stuff that that Ollie's mentioned there. I think for me there there is something more that can be done and I spend a lot of time in education outside of work and for me we need a a longitudinal kind of approach to this and I think where we're trying to engage as a group of schools with technology providers it seems that it's very much on a kind of ad hoc basis i.e. Organization X might give two days a year for volunteering and they'll go into a school and give a speech. But, you know, if you're in an inner city school and you've got no role models and you've got no access to technology, careers or understanding of it, it could be quite difficult to access. And I think that's where always trying to have a call to arms for people is like how does how do tech companies think about doing something differently in that space and most tech companies have got a presence in different areas of the country. So what can you do to engage with schools on a local basis on a long-term initiative rather than you know me turn up at a school and give a talk on careers in in technology in in different sectors might be interesting for that one hour that I'm there but what happens the week after and the month after. So I think that's where we need sustained engagement if we're really going to encourage people to think about careers in technology because in schools it's pretty much computer science or or business computing right we don't talk necessarily about the the breadth of careers in testing you know user interface design there's all sorts of different you know career parts that you need to think of so we have to do that early in my mind because it's no good worrying about the challenge when you get to post A level or into apprentichip like discussions because by that time people, it's too late for them to start thinking about those kind of careers. Yeah. So, I think, you know, we can do more locally across the tech sector. I think that's what we should be doing over a long-term investment basis rather than a you can access our free licenses or you can access our free training or we'll come in and paint your fence because that's our one day that we've got sort of thing. How do we make it more meaningful? Yeah. No, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. I think that greater connection between um industry and and public is really important. And so one of the notes that rings really true is that I think from an an early education and higher education perspective um the the level of the the training is in a position where it's probably less practical than it needs to be to get people into the right space and also challenges in terms of how it specializes. You know, as Carl says, hundreds of different maybe potentially thousands of different types of jobs that sit across industry. Typically, I see people in a very broad brush of of of education rather than getting that exposure to say if they're going to be a software developer coding in something like Python. I think there's probably been more advancements from a perspective of getting people in software engineering. But if you were to talk to people about, you know, some of the stuff that goes in user center design from a working, you know, working in accessibility, it's probably less so. So I think it's how can you almost fine-tune and get people more specialized at an earlier age and get them more exposed things and as Carl probably alludes to and it's right is that there needs to be a closer collaboration between industry and government to kind of facilitate that. Yeah, I think it is probably that exposure piece as well because it's kind of you don't know what you don't know, right? And and and if you've never heard of, you know, what is unuser centered design? I I have no idea what that is. then you wouldn't like, you know, it wouldn't be your natural default to think, yeah, I think I'd be good at that. So, it's about how do we expose children to uh to the possibilities of of working in the tech sector. Yeah. There's a lot more to be done, isn't there? Exactly. And then when you get through to university, as Ollie started to talk about there, for me, one thing we're trying to do at um one of the universities I'm on the board of is to is think about micro credentials. All right. So you know you you do your degree course which you know may because of the cycle of things might not be as upto-date as you might want it to be but if we can then start to offer you know qualifications with Microsoft with Salesforce with Service Now with whomever is provide those back well then you'll graduate with a degree plus you could be a Microsoft certified engineer or the equivalent of so that way you're immediately hopefully more employable and that gives you that other advantage but gives you the kind of practical skills that you might not get in the breadth across across the degree. So that again that happens in other countries happens less so I think in the UK. Um but we're we're kind of thinking about how do we partner with the technology providers to to provide that and I think that'll be a real valuable thing and that doesn't have to be just across the computing type courses. You can make those accessible to a whole range. So then again you're you're infusing digital skills in to a range of different courses rather than saying that's another additional thing that you need to do. Yeah. Yeah. And and digital skills is sort of it isn't just needed for those like software developer roles, right? It is sort of needed across the breadth of an organization at some level. So, uh so getting so getting those kinds of trainings sounds really sounds really good. I think this has been a really uh insightful discussion today. As we start to draw things to a close, if you had sort of one piece of advice for those listening or one sort of big takeaway for public sector, what would it be? Are we um I'd say doing fantastic effort to and in my experience over the last 10 years in um building digital skills, but there's more that can be done and I think there's a great opportunity with new technology potential of AI to to find ways to potentially use um that opportunity to develop pipelines of talent around people from more under underrepresented backgrounds and to buy them with a really cracking opportunity. So, um, keep going and and let's, uh, let's see if we can do a bit more with that as well. Yeah. Amazing. Carl, it's always difficult with one just one thing, isn't it? But I think we we there's a feels like we've got a real moment in time where there's a renewed focus on digital and the art of the possible and the opportunities that opens up. So, we've got to embrace that um, and take it. For me the the one big learning that we've kind of experienced over the last year or so is to is the fact that we we can't solve all these problems on our own. So collaboration is key. So find the people that are doing interesting things whether that's across the sector, outside the sector, collaborate um and work with others to try and solve the problem and learn from them. For me, I think the big takeaway from the discussion today is that um public sector technology is really exciting area to work in and there's lots to offer people. Honestly, when Carl was talking in the beginning, I was like, maybe I should be working in Carl's team. Like, you were really selling it. We got vacancies. But I think uh there's there's there's a really great opportunity for people that are really curious and inquisitive and want to feel uh that there the work that they're doing really has a lot of value for society. I think there's exciting opportunity and especially in a in an environment where technology is constantly changing and there's always something new to combine that with um with you know delivering something for the wider social good. It feels like an exciting time. Thank you so much for uh for joining me today. This has been a really great discussion and uh let's do it again. Why not? Thank you. Thanks so much.