Socitm Blog

Readers of this blog will be aware of the web skills framework Socitm is developing as part of its wider plans to develop a web professionals group that will offer public sector webbies an attractive professional 'home'. The initiative has also been well covered in Sharon O'Dea's blog from the UKGovCamp a couple of weeks ago.

Thanks to its work in the web arena, principally the annual Better connected report, the Website takeup service, and this community, Socitm Insight is in regular touch with a large constituency of web professionals, and is aware that many of them feel undervalued, misunderstood, and mismanaged by their employers and colleagues.

So, behind the demand for a professional 'home' for public sector webbies lies a strong drive to define what web professionals do, to demonstrate how their roles relate to other professions within employing organisations, and critically, specify the levels of skill and professionalism at which web professional in relation to the national skills framework.

Thursday 4 February saw the second of two planned workshops to support initial definition of a web skills framework, in a project being led by Mary Wintershausen from Socitm Consulting.

An enthusiastic bunch of web practitioners and managers, plus some individuals with backgrounds in professional development and accreditation, assembled the CLG offices in Victoria . Local government, central government departments, CoI and Directgov were all represented, and among the group was a good cross section of professional web skills, ranging from the technical, through editorial and publishing to the wider arena of internal and external communications.

The group picked up the threads from the first workshop, which had ended up with the compilation of a large and wide-ranging list of possible 'web professional' roles and sub-roles, covering four broad areas including web management, technical development, editorial and content development, as well as web-based communications. Within these roles, a total of 128 skills or activities was identified, running alphabetically from 'accessibility' to 'writing for the web'.

In between the workshops, Mary reviewed our list to see the extent to which elements on it were already included in existing skills frameworks for related professional areas, including the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA), developed by the IT sector, Skillset modules developed by the film & TV sector, and digital communications and web publishing modules developed by marketing and publishing professional bodies.

She'd also looked at the range of skills specified in the large number of web role job descriptions sent in following our appeals to web managers and others who've have been following what we are doing. Added to this mix were the 'core skills for government communicators' defined by Whitehall's Government Communications Network - recommended to us by a number of Whitehall webbies - and material from Business Link defining the skills and accreditation required by editors in other organisations publishing directly onto businesslink.gov.uk.

It's pretty clear from our investigations through this project that the only way that web professional skills are going to be fully identified, documented and recognised is for us to draw up a new, web-dedicated framework. We did start out thinking we might be able to add web skills to an existing framework, but the scope and range of what webbies do is just too wide, and touches parts of too many different professions, for this to be a feasible option.

So the task last Thursday was to get started on assessing bits of existing frameworks that were relevant to webbies (mostly those identified above), identify gaps we'd need to fill, and consider how descriptions of specific skills would need to be adapted to reflect the specifics of what web professionals actually do. We split into three groups to cover editorial/publishing, communications, and technical web skills.

Huge progress was made, and Mary will now collate our work and fashion it into something we can circulate for consultation - hopefully early next month when the core group of people who've attended workshops have seen the result and had its chance to comment and provide feed back.