A new tech tool, which replaces an Excel spreadsheet, will enable departmental employees to connect with peers from across government and obtain personalised coaching sessions to support their professional development
The Cabinet Office’s Government Skills division has launched a new digital platform that helps civil servants find free one-to-one coaching to aid their professional development.
It allows users to choose from a database of more than 250 fully-trained coaches, all of whom are current civil servants, and then creates a messaging channel so that face-to-face or online sessions can be arranged. The Government Skills Internal Coaching Service replaces an older system that directed officials looking for a coach to an Excel spreadsheet.
Under the new offer, digital matching connects civil servants to a selection of coaches who meet their needs and preferences. The functionality of the Internal Coaching Service platform allows coaches to be searched for by department, profession or name. Officials can decide who they want to work with by looking at profiles of suggested coaches and reading about their professional background and approach.
Government Skills suggests officials seeking professional-development help undertake “chemistry reviews” with up to three coaches before deciding which one suits them best.
Head of coaching Helen Ogilvy said the new service is run for civil servants by civil servants and represents a “personalised way” of supporting professional development.
“We are confident that this new service will provide an enhanced user experience which will encourage more people to give coaching a go as it is a fantastic way to boost performance and explore fresh ways of tackling work-based issues,” she said. “Crucially, the service is free – giving individuals the autonomy to explore coaching as a development tool without needing sign-off from managers.”
Chris Berthoud, a digital and communications specialist at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, has been a coach at the department and its predecessor since 2016. He said all of the coaches who can be accessed via the Internal Coaching Service are suitably qualified and trained.
“This means we can help people rise to the top of their game (think tennis coaches, but for work) and also work with people who might have challenges around confidence, resilience, relationships with managers and so on,” he added. “We typically offer six one-hour sessions, around three weeks apart. It’s heartening to see people grow in self-awareness, try out new behaviours, and – occasionally – undergo some kind of revelation which changes their life for the better.”
Ogilvy said that while coaching could help people who are struggling in their job to perform better, the “vast majority” of civil servants who seek professional-development help are already performing well and want to take things further.
“Unless you think you’re performing at your best, coaching can help,” she said.
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Jim Squire is a consulting fellow in the Ministry of Defence’s Exploration Division, and one of the civil servants Ogilvy has personally coached. He said he had entered into the coaching relationship “with some scepticism” and came to realise he had been “overly self-reliant” for much of his career.
Squire said the sessions had made him realise it was OK to ask for support and that Ogilvy’s guidance and encouragement had helped him to examine his recent experiences “quite rigorously”.
He said: “She gave me the space and just enough nudges to explore the underlying issues, develop my own views on what alternatives I could pursue and finally helped me to make my own decisions that I can basically choose to be optimistic and positive about a future career I have control over rather than remain negatively focussed on things that haven’t gone so well in the past.”
Squire said he had been truly impressed by how skilfully Ogilvy had provided the right balance of questions, inferences and challenges.
“She never took the problems or the solutions off me and what we’ve come to is genuinely my solution, but not one I could have worked through without her guidance,” he said.
The Government Skills Internal Coaching Service can be accessed here, or via Civil Service Learning.
