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Case Study: Training and Development - Department for Work and Pensions
The Department for Work and Pensions believes its workforce needs to reflect the community it serves if it is to design and deliver policies and services that meet the needs of today’s and tomorrow’s society. In many ways we are in an excellent position as we have already achieved good diversity levels across the Department. However, we wish to improve representation at senior levels.
For example, our statistics clearly show that women are in the overwhelming majority from administrative to middle manager level. However, from middle management level up the situation is totally reversed; men make up nearly 65% of our senior civil service. Our target is that 39% of senior civil service posts should be filled by women by April 2008.
- As part of our talent management strategy, we encouraged women to apply for the Cabinet Office run Leaders UnLtd programme at grades 6 and 7 level. Over 85% of the Department’s applicants were women and 75% of those successful were women. And 40% of those on the Department’s new Emerging Talent programme are women.
- In the first instance we explored mentoring schemes specifically for women, but concluded that we should instead develop a more comprehensive mentoring scheme for staff in under-represented groups, including but not exclusively women, to give them the confidence to compete for opportunities on merit. We are working with colleagues in all parts of the Department to develop this and we are also asking our staff what they want from a mentoring scheme, for example do women prefer women as mentors. We are using our available data to ascertain what the demand for mentors is likely to be.
- We are also developing a reverse mentoring scheme, where staff in under-represented groups mentor those in senior grades. This will mean that senior managers understand the issues faced by more junior staff in under-represented groups.
Contact Point
Lorna Buchanan
