[LINK] Australian Government Workforce Planning for Library, Records Management & ICT Staff

[Tom Worthington]

The Australian Government has released an APS Workforce Planning Guide: 
http://www.apsc.gov.au/publications11/wfp.htm

This is timely with government enforced reductions in funding to federal 
agencies forcing large scale reductions in employment. Without some 
planning, the cutbacks in jobs could result in an unbalanced workforce, 
without the necessary skills and experience.

One interesting aspect is that ICT is categorised separately from 
technical and engineering jobs, although most university have now 
incorporated their ICT schools into the engineering faculty. There is 
still some overlap between Information and Knowledge Management, ICT and 
administrative skills.

The Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) have issued the guide 
under a Creative Commons license, allowing modification and reuse of the 
documents by government and private organisations. Unfortunately the 
APSC has produced the documents for paper publication, with the 
electronic versions not suited to on-line viewing.

This is a very comprehensive and well written guide. However, the 
Australian Government does not have any unique workforce planning 
requirements. As an example, there is nothing which makes a ICT 
professional, librarian, records manager or plumber working for the 
Australian government different to one working for state, local 
government or the private sector. It would be better for the APS to 
integrate its planning with that of other levels of Australian 
government and with the private sector, than produce its own unique 
requirements. As an example, the Open University UK have created SFIA 
generic IT professional job roles using the standard skills sets from 
the Skills Framework for the Information Age: 
http://www8.open.ac.uk/employers/sector-solutions/it-and-telecoms/sfia-based-job-profiles

I have extracted the Background, Guiding Principles and the ICT job 
descriptions from the APS Planning Guide, and converted it to HTML: 
http://blog.tomw.net.au/2012/04/australian-government-workforce.html#guide


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards
Legislation

Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/