Lots of energy and some great collaborative working between people across the public sector got Socitm’s initiative to develop a skills framework for web professionals off to a flying start yesterday. (29 Nov 2009)
More than twenty of us sat down together in a room at the CLG offices in Victoria in the first leg of a project to define the range web roles and activities and the levels at which these operate.
Among us were web managers from Whitehall departments, the third sector, the Government ‘supersites’, and local authorities form all over (including Eden in Cumbria – thanks for making the trip Julian, it must have been a long, long day!)
The project is being funded by Socitm as part of our wider initiative to develop a web professionals group, and follows a lot of work we did earlier this year, with great support from Paul Canning, to establish the need for a formal group and to make sure we were not going to be reinventing a wheel already happily turning elsewhere.
We did find bits of activity going on in a variety of places, but nothing that recognised or catered for the wide range of people and specialisms linked together within a sector that has come from nowhere in little more than a decade. What also came though really strongly in our research was that many webbies feel misunderstood, mismanaged, and undervalued by their employers and (non-webbie) managers.
So, behind the demand for a professional ‘home’ for public sector webbies is a strong drive to define what web professionals do, demonstrate how their roles relate to other professions within employing organisations, the levels of seniority at which they operate, and how all this fits into the national skills framework and the concept of ‘professionalism’.
The initiative is timely too. As I was preparing for the workshop last week, I received this depressing, but sadly familiar story from a highly-respected web professional: ‘Single status has graded online comms officers below colleagues in other areas of communication. A real blow for having online comms recognised for the skill set and responsibility of publishing online to a potentially global audience’.
Its not easy for webbies in Whitehall either. One of their frequently heard grumbles is that the civil service doesn’t really recognise web work as a specialism – I gather their idea of a suitable career development opportunity for an web or e-comms professional is a spell as a press officer…… .
With these sort of issues in mind, the key foundation activity for Socitm’s proposed web professionals group is this work on skill and role definition. The ideas is to build this into a framework within which anyone who has a web role will be able to see the things they do, and the level at which they do them, set out clearly. The framework will be hugely useful for identifying discrete web roles, writing job descriptions, defining training needs, plotting career development – oh, and of course, for using in grading appeals………
What we did yesterday was compile a (huge) list of web roles and activities and then start to define (an even larger) list of sub-roles and activities. Then, guided by workshop leader Mary Wintershausen, a veteran of many similar exercises in related professions, we started to put these into the sort of levels of responsibility/seniority defined in the national skills framework.
With that work completed, there’s now a pause while Mary goes away to look at the material generated, plus some other material we’ve gathered from what you might call ‘adjacent’ professions in publishing, marketing and ICT, plus lots of web job descriptions we’ve been supplied with (we could do with more – please email vicky.sargent@socitm.net .
Before Chirstmas we will be seeing some draft skill/role definitions for us to do some more work on, and then some time on in late January we’ll be getting together again to chew over what we’ve done, before putting the results out to wider consultation in the webbisphere.
Report from Vicky Sargent,
Marketing Consultant,
socitm
