The objective of the project is to develop recommendations for the qualification of employees in public administration, as there is a need to improve competences and skills - across departments and countries.

The two-and-a-half-year project aims to analyse competence requirements and qualification developments, draw strategic conclusions for the qualification process and finally prepare concrete recommendations for action.

The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen is taking the lead under the direction of Henning Lühr, State Councillor for Finance. Together with the Institut für Informationsmanagement Bremen (Institute for Information Management Bremen) and the German Research Institute for Public Administration (Deutschen Forschungsinstitut für öffentliche Verwaltung) in Speyer, Fraunhofer FOKUS is responsible for the scientific expertise and is supporting all project phases. In order to achieve the greatest possible practical suitability, the project also involves political and administrative stakeholders, decision-makers from administrative practice, social partners and interest groups, as well as training and further education institutions in the public sector. For example, the Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community (BMI), the federal states of Berlin, Hamburg, Hesse and Lower Saxony, selected local authorities, the trade union ver.di and the Deutscher Beamtenbund (German Civil Service Association) are project partners.

First milestone: meta-study on digital skills

The Qualifica Digitalis project is divided into three phases. The first project phase is scheduled to run until 31.05.2021. The objective here is to analyse and prepare the competence requirements and qualification and professional development trends in the public sector that have changed as a result of administrative digitalisation.

A meta-study created within this framework is the first milestone of the project. It forms the basis for further analyses of the competence requirements in the study domains. Relevant literature was researched and analysed on the three core questions relating to the skills of specialists and managers in digitalised working environments, the prospects for the working culture and working methods of public administrations and modern learning and teaching methods. Juliane Schmeling, researcher in the Digital Public Services business unit at Fraunhofer FOKUS and one of the authors of the study: “Our study shows that personal and not directly IT-related skills in particular are gaining in importance with digitalisation: Self-organisation skills, problem-solving skills, social skills, orientation skills and management techniques. Not that these were not important in the past - they just must not be neglected in the context of digitalisation.”

In the further course of the Qualifica Digitalis project, the domains of social administration, central administration, judicial administration, tax administration, IT management and IT service as well as other citizen-related services will be analysed.