In this final blog of our series, one of our former apprentices reflects on how they grew in confidence through the process and offers some advice for anyone considering studying for a senior leader apprenticeship.
In 2019, my manager informed me our organisation had partnered with INLOGOV at the University of Birmingham, meaning an opportunity to enrol on their Senior Leader Apprenticeship programme. It seemed almost too good to be true to think that this opportunity would be fully funded. Never one to shy away from a challenge I decided to apply. Brave. I was further surprised to be accepted onto the course and began my journey somewhat naively without quite appreciating what lay ahead.
It is fair to say that I had underestimated the time I would need to complete the learning, reading, assignments and portfolio preparation. It was a steep learning curve but I soon developed strategies to manage my time. I preferred to read in the evening. Many an evening was spent sitting in the car reading journal articles while my daughters were at various clubs. The time I was investing was becoming more and more worthwhile as I learned to apply new skills and ways of thinking to my work, as well as receive pleasing grades for my assignment. I started to think perhaps I could do this after all.
The onset of Covid-19 meant that additional challenges of remote learning and home-schooling my daughters had to be managed alongside other pressures, but I carried on, and with amazing support from my family, work colleagues (and some very understanding tutors) I managed to continue working through the assignments and the intense phase of my project.
I won’t pretend this was easy, but the more I became engrossed in my project the more determined I became that I would complete the course. Completion meant both personal pride and a final project which would be beneficial to my work and team. Compiling my portfolio gave me a great opportunity to reflect on some of my work achievements, and to identify areas where I needed to improve and demonstrate my skills. This culminated in a project showcase and professional discussion that allowed me to show how my learning had improved working practices.
If you are interested in a course like this my top five tips/reflections are:
It sounds corny, but if you want to achieve something, and have the right support to do so, then you can achieve it.
Commit to the process.
It will probably be more work than you imagine, but the personal and professional rewards are worth it.
Buddy up with someone else on the course so you can support one another – this was invaluable to me.
Onenote and highlighters will become your best friends!
All this week we are celebrating INLOGOV’s Senior Leader Apprenticeship. In this short blog we are offering an overview of the programme, it builds on yesterday’s post about why we launched an apprenticeship for public service leaders.
In a nutshell – public servants enrol on a two-year programme where they study online and on campus, and develop the knowledge, skills and behaviours expected of a senior leader. That’s it really.
The ideal student is someone who has around 5 or more years’ experience as a manager and ambition to become a senior leader in public service.
The programme is made up of six modules. For each of the two years there’s one module in the Autumn, one in Spring and one in early summer. Modules are blended, which means 6 weeks of online learning and then coming together for two days on campus.
The online learning is structured so you can choose when in the week you want to work on it. There’re usually 2 or 3 papers to read, a set of pages with course content to work through and a discussion board. This board is where you connect with others on the programme – responding to a question, posting to the board and commenting on the posts of others. This is where you find out what happens in other organisations, something our apprentices really value.
The modules are designed and led by research active academics and lecturers with first-hand public service experience: public management and governance, leadership, digital era public policy, evidence and policy, performance strategy and challenge, and commercialisation. The modules are assessed with two written assignments. These are submitted online and feedback is received after 15 days.
In the weeks between modules there is time to spend undertaking activities to develop and evidence competency as a senior leader. This activity is documented in a portfolio. Once a term you meet with your practice tutor who helps review progress and identify priorities, opportunities, and next steps.
Once the taught modules are complete you undertake a special workplace project to develop a Strategic Business Proposal. This is a 12-week project and designed to demonstrate your acquired knowledge, skills and behaviours expected of a senior leader in public service.
The final piece of the puzzle is to undertake a 2-hour oral assessment, one to one with an independent assessor. For the first half you will present and respondent questions about your business proposal. The second half is a professional discussion led by the contents of your portfolio.
All being well the process is completed in two years and two months. The qualification is a Senior Leader Apprenticeship, but in addition the CMI grant chartered manager status and the University awards you with a Postgraduate Diploma in Public Management and Leadership. After completion you are invited to upgrade your PG diploma to a full MSc by completing a dissertation without further costs. This invitation is offered to all apprentices who successfully complete the programme.
If you’d like to speak one to one please email me and we can set up a call [email protected]
Dr Stephen Jeffares is Associate Professor in Public Policy and Digital Government at the Institute for Local government studies. He is also Director of INLOGOV’s Public Management and Leadership apprenticeship programme and author of three books: Hybrid Governance, Hashtag Politics and the Virtual Public Servant.
It is national apprenticeship week! This year’s theme is “skills for life”. We thought it an opportunity to celebrate the public servants on INLOGOV’s somewhat unique apprenticeship programme that seeks to build the future generation public service leaders.
I can’t blame you if you tend to glaze over when you read about apprenticeships. The world of modern apprenticeships is mired in jargon which can be daunting if not off-putting to those new to it. It was certainly a steep learning curve for colleagues when we first set about designing the programme back in 2016. But please read on.
There are now many universities and other education providers delivering the Senior Leader apprenticeship. But from the beginning we wanted to explore how we could take what a somewhat generic set of management competencies and translate into a vision for the future of public service.
There were moments in 2016 and 2017 where we were starting to regret embarking on that journey but it all fell into place on the morning we welcomed our first cohort to the campus. The energy in the room is always life affirming and reminds you that managers in public service are not the faceless bureaucrats as often portrayed, they are clever, creative, curious and dedicated to their local communities. On top of that, working with groups of public servants is what we do, what we have always done since our formation in the mid 1960s.
Leading and managing public services is a tough job, there is no typical week and work is rarely confined to 9-5. When the financial crash bit in 2009-2010 and the austerity budgets took hold making cuts to the development of public sector leaders was perhaps the easiest and most popular cut to make. Since then, our public servants have had to continually adapt and innovate and adjust to new ways of working, with reduced budgets and higher expectations. As we emerge from the latest chapter of the global pandemic our local authorities are looking to new ways to support local communities. To succeed we need to develop our leaders.
You could say the apprenticeship levy and programmes like the Senior Leader apprenticeship has thrown management development a lifeline – it offers a means for local authorities to foster the next generation of public service leaders by giving them time away from their day-to-day work, an opportunity to develop new knowledge and skills, build networks with colleagues from across the country and learn from world leading academics in some of the finest research intensive universities.
There are three unique features of an apprenticeship programme that distinguish it from your regular part time postgrad qualification. The first is time. Learners are given 20% of their regular working hours a year to dedicate to their studies and development. This puts the student at a huge advantage as all too often part time qualifications have to be completed in evenings, weekends and holidays. This can be jarring to line managers however – they can often be somewhat surprised, horrified even, to consider letting their brightest and best be away for a 5th of a time. But they soon realise it does not mean losing somebody a day a week, that learning can be flexible and fit around major projects, furthermore that off-the job means undertaking special projects and much needed energy and capacity.
The second feature is commitment – The funding is structured to ensure that all parties -learner, line manager and programme leader are committed to each and every apprenticeship. It is this focus that means we can be sure people are on the right programme at the right time and that they are going to be supported through. All too often postgraduate study is undermined by a lack of commitment. It can seem pedantic to have tripartite commitment statements, but it matters and it works.
Third is support – we have always supported our postgraduate learners with academic tutors / dissertation tutors, welfare tutors etc, but apprentices get a dedicated practice tutor who meets with apprentice and line manager regularly to identify priorities, and discuss progress.
This programme is arguably the most demanding programme we have ever delivered. Not only do our students have to complete 6 taught modules but they have to complete a portfolio evidencing their competencies as a senior leader, a strategic business proposal, a project presentation and a professional discussion with an external assessor. But with the time, commitment and support in place we are seeing first hand it is possible to succeed.
This week we’ll be taking over the INLOGOV blog. Tomorrow we’ll offer an overview of the programme – its structure and expectations.
Later in the week you can read some accounts of some recent apprentices – what motivated them to do an apprenticeship at this stage in their career, their experiences and their tips for anyone considering applying to the Senior Leader programme.
If you’d like to speak one to one please email me and we can set up a call [email protected]
Dr Stephen Jeffares is Associate Professor in Public Policy and Digital Government at the Institute for Local government studies. He is also Director of INLOGOV’s Public Management and Leadership apprenticeship programme and author of three books: Hybrid Governance, Hashtag Politics and the Virtual Public Servant.
In December 2021, I had my graduation ceremony at the University of Birmingham having completed the MSc Public Management course run here at INLOGOV. It was a very enjoyable experience but was also sadly, due to COVID-19, one of only two occasions in which I had the pleasure to visit the campus. Seeing as it’s now been over a year since my graduation, I thought it would be a good time to share my experiences so far as a Birmingham graduate.
Specifically, I want to reflect on how the Public Management course has played a role in some of my professional endeavours since last year. I’d love to say that I walked straight into a graduate job the day after graduating; indeed, many of my fellow course mates were already working as professionals in the public sector and I’ve no doubt that their successes on the course will have paid off tremendously in their continued career progressions.
In my case, I was not yet certain what the future would hold. Since 2018, I had done a mixture of part-time and ‘bank’ work as a housekeeper for my local care home which was always handy during holiday periods and in-between my undergraduate and postgraduate study but was also a job I genuinely enjoyed. It also provided an important area of study for my postgraduate dissertation which I have spoken more about in a previous blog. While of course this healthcare role did, by its very nature, overlap with some of the research themes of the Public Management course – for example, the notion of ‘street-level bureaucracy’ or the role of front-line workers in policy-making and public service delivery – I was keen to see how the material I had learnt about transcends across other areas of the public sector.
I soon found myself in my first graduate role as an Evaluation Advisor for the Office for National Statistics (LinkedIn also helped a lot in securing this position for any new graduates reading!) The primary responsibility of this role is to support the work of analysts – that is, those advising on evidence-based policymaking in government – by ensuring that the best methods and data are used for informing important decision-making processes. Within the first few days of starting the position, I found that the skills I had learned and utilised during the Public Management course were already proving useful. For instance, I was asked to assist in identifying and reviewing existing cases of good practice for a piece of government guidance written by the Analysis Function – a sort of ‘literature review’ if you will, and akin to the necessary steps taken when completing a final dissertation project as expected on the Public Management course. I remember thinking, “Hey, I’ve done this before!”.
But this was just one of several transferable skills I had learned about and used during my time at INLOGOV, and which were also proving applicable to this graduate role. Leadership is a fundamental ‘behaviour’ that is essential to the role. In its broadest sense, this means being able to set direction and to motivate a team to work collaboratively with other government departments and stakeholders to establish common practice based on robust analytical methods. I would argue that this firstly reflects some of the themes of the leadership theories covered in the Public Leadership syllabus (for example, setting shared group objectives in behavioural leadership theory and the emphasis placed on encouraging and inspiring others in transformational leadership theory). But secondly, these leadership skills reflect the aims and objectives for students undertaking the Public Management course which, amongst many other things, involve building the knowledge and skills necessary for leading in a public capacity. That is, to be able to take some of the concepts of these leadership theories and apply them in practice.
Certainly, the ability to link theory to practice and having a strong capacity for critical enquiry are attributes which are central to the research ethos of INLOGOV but have also greatly informed my practice as an Evaluation Advisor where I am often tasked with reviewing evaluation concepts and methodologies and critically analysing their applicability to the wider strategic goals of the Analysis Function. This also relies heavily on the ability to communicate strategy to the team and can therefore often be a test of public speaking skills. Looking back, I remember a seminar for the Public Management and Governance module in which we were encouraged as a class to engage in group discussions, to reflect on our reading of the literature and to exchange knowledge with peers. As well as providing the opportunity to critically engage collectively with the course material, this session really aimed at boosting our self-confidence in public speaking which has certainly been an invaluable skill both academically and in the workplace.
To sum up, the skills which are taught on the Public Management course are qualities which are not only designed to help you successfully complete the course, but they are also transferable life skills which will be advantageous in all your future career endeavours as I found myself soon after graduating. I look forward to seeing how these skills will continue to have value long into my career.
Luke Bradbury graduated from the MSc Public Management in 2021 and is now Evaluation Adviser for the Office for National Statistics.
Wesley Meares, Beth M. Rauhaus and William Hatcher
In our recent Local Government Studiesarticle, we report the career paths of city managers from a nationwide survey of 345 chief administrative officers leading cities throughout the United States (U.S.). We sought to understand who the chief administrative officers are, how they arrived in their current position, and the significant challenges they face. Exploring these topics helps us describe the composition of local government managers, and knowing the career paths of these public administrators helps our field in preparing future managers for their service. While these topics have been researched in the past, for example, by Watson and Hassett (2004) and Folz and French (2005), an updated view of chief administrative officers of U.S. cities was needed. To explore these questions, a survey was sent to chief administrative officers of small, medium, and large cities throughout the U.S. From our survey, we learned three key takeaways.
Who: The Make-Up
Local government management in the U.S. needs to diversify. Most survey respondents reported being white males, with nearly half being 55 or older and only slightly over 18% reporting as female. Public administrators must reflect and mirror the communities they serve, and local government management in the U.S. does not represent the nation’s diverse population. Thus, diversity needs to be a focus of the field in the future. There will soon be an opportunity with the impending retirements of many in local government management – what the ICMA has labeled a “silver tsunami.” This oncoming wave shows up in our survey’s findings. Over 50% of those surveyed indicated they intended to retire in the next ten years, and 30% said they would retire within five years. The need to hire the next generation of local government managers is an excellent opportunity to increase gender and racial diversity in local government.
How: Career Pathways
Local government management is more stable than in the past. Of those surveyed, the average tenure in their current positions was a little over seven years. One career pathway to local government management is having prior work experience in the area. Most of those surveyed were hired into their current positions as external candidates, often making lateral moves in their careers. Another career pathway to local government is having experience in budgeting and planning. City managers identified developing negotiation skills, having a mentor, and earning an MPA as other critical pathways to local government management.
What: Major Challenges
Local government management is more concerned with technical aspects of the job (time management, leading teams, human resource actions, etc.) than political conflict and relations with the public. This is a surprising finding. On the one hand, it is positive that city managers are concerned with the nuts and bolts of their jobs. However, on the other hand, many of the challenges they face will surround issues of politics. For our field of public administration to advance democratic governance, we need public administrators to be concerned about politics and community outreach.
With the fast-approaching retirement of many within local government, there is an opportunity for U.S. cities to diversify their workforce, particularly those leading cities. Our study’s data on career pathways provide a roadmap to help public administration scholars and instructors help achieve effective, efficient, and equity in local government management.
Wesley L. Meares is an Associate Professor of Public Administration in the Department of Social Sciences at Augusta University, where he serves as the graduate program director for the Master of Public Administration program. His research focuses on housing policy, community development, sustainability, and local government administration.
Beth M. Rauhaus is an Associate Professor of Public Administration and the MPA Program Coordinator in the Department of Social Sciences at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. Her research explores issues of gender and diversity in the public sector.
William Hatcher, Ph.D. is a professor of public administration and chair of the Department of Social Sciences at Augusta University. His research explores the intersections of public administration and healthy policy, public administration education, and public budgeting.
References:
Folz, D. H., & French, P. E. (2005). Managing America’s small communities: People, politics, and performance. Rowman & Littlefield.
Watson, D. J., & Hassett, W. L. (2004). Career Paths of City Managers in America’s Largest Council‐Manager Cities. Public Administration Review, 64(2), 192-199.
It is national apprenticeship week! This year’s theme is “build the future”. We thought it an opportunity to celebrate the public servants on INLOGOV’s somewhat unique apprenticeship programme that seeks to build the future generation public service leaders.
I can’t blame you if you tend to glaze over when you read about apprenticeships. The world of modern apprenticeships is mired in jargon which can be daunting if not off-putting to those new to it. It was certainly a steep learning curve for colleagues when we first set about designing the programme back in 2016. But please read on.
There are now many universities and other education providers delivering the Senior Leader apprenticeship. But from the beginning we wanted to explore how we could take what a somewhat generic set of management competencies and translate into a vision for the future of public service.
There were moments in 2016 and 2017 where we were starting to regret embarking on that journey but it all fell into place on the morning we welcomed our first cohort to the campus. The energy in the room is always life affirming and reminds you that managers in public service are not the faceless bureaucrats as often portrayed, they are clever, creative, curious and dedicated to their local communities. On top of that, working with groups of public servants is what we do, what we have always done since our formation in the mid 1960s.
Leading and managing public services is a tough job, there is no typical week and work is rarely confined to 9-5. When the financial crash bit in 2009-2010 and the austerity budgets took hold making cuts to the development of public sector leaders was perhaps the easiest and most popular cut to make. Since then, our public servants have had to continually adapt and innovate and adjust to new ways of working, with reduced budgets and higher expectations. As we emerge from the latest chapter of the global pandemic our local authorities are looking to new ways to support local communities. To succeed we need to develop our leaders.
You could say the apprenticeship levy and programmes like the Senior Leader apprenticeship has thrown management development a lifeline – it offers a means for local authorities to foster the next generation of public service leaders by giving them time away from their day-to-day work, an opportunity to develop new knowledge and skills, build networks with colleagues from across the country and learn from world leading academics in some of the finest research intensive universities.
Last month the second cohort of our programme completed their End Point Assessments, assessed by the Chartered Management Institute. Confirmation that everyone has passed, several with distinction is one of the emails that brightens your day. For this group it is job done as they resume normal duties.
There are three unique features of an apprenticeship programme that distinguish it from your regular part time postgrad qualification. The first is time. Learners are given 20% of their regular working hours a year to dedicate to their studies and development. This puts the student at a huge advantage as all too often part time qualifications have to be completed in evenings, weekends and holidays. This can be jarring to line managers however – they can often be somewhat surprised, horrified even, to consider letting their brightest and best be away for a 5th of a time. But they soon realise it does not mean losing somebody a day a week, that learning can be flexible and fit around major projects, furthermore that off-the job means undertaking special projects and much needed energy and capacity.
The second feature is commitment – The funding is structured to ensure that all parties -learner, line manager and programme leader are committed to each and every apprenticeship. It is this focus that means we can be sure people are on the right programme at the right time and that they are going to be supported through. All too often postgraduate study is undermined by a lack of commitment. It can seem pedantic to have tripartite commitment statements, but it matters and it works.
Third is support – we have always supported our postgraduate learners with academic tutors / dissertation tutors, welfare tutors etc, but apprentices get a dedicated practice tutor who meets with apprentice and line manager regularly to identify priorities, and discuss progress.
This programme is arguably the most demanding programme we have ever delivered. Not only do our students have to complete 6 taught modules but they have to complete a portfolio evidencing their competencies as a senior leader, a strategic business proposal, a project presentation and a professional discussion with an external assessor. But with the time, commitment and support in place we are seeing first hand it is possible to succeed.
All this week we’ll be taking over the INLOGOV blog. Tomorrow we’ll offer an overview of the programme – its structure and expectations.
Later in the week you can read some accounts of some recent apprentices – what motivated them to do an apprenticeship at this stage in their career, their experiences and their tips for anyone considering applying to the Senior Leader programme.
We’ll be hosting lunchtime webinar on Thursday 3rd March at noon, where you can hear more about the programme and pose questions to me – the Academic Programme Director. You can sign up for the webinar or access to the recording here:
Alternatively, if you’d like to speak one to one please email me and we can set up a call [email protected]
Dr Stephen Jeffares is Associate Professor in Public Policy and Digital Government at the Institute for Local government studies. He is also Director of INLOGOV’s Public Management and Leadership apprenticeship programme and author of three books: Hybrid Governance, Hashtag Politics and the Virtual Public Servant.
INLOGOV Blog 