Sustainable, results-driven tech investment remains a major conundrum for the finance leaders of today’s public sector workforce. For example, the UK Government invested £26 billion in technology in 2023, yet the Cabinet Office still classifies 28% of its most critical systems as ‘red-rated’ – not overspent, but at serious risk of failure because they’re too old, too fragile, or both. In tandem, departments have been instructed to cut £1.2 billion from external consultancy spend by 2026.
The dual demands of modernising while tightening the purse strings require a rethink of where the best return on investment can be created. Many of the consultancies that deliver system updates and overhaul projects see them through and move on. This can leave a gaping skills chasm in-house when it comes to maintaining and leveraging digital systems to get the most from the investment.
Alongside investment in the right sustainable technologies, the public sector must turn its attention to cultivating a digital workforce that grows with it. Those in charge of budgets should be mindful of the need to build in-house capability that keeps improving long after a new platform goes live. For public bodies that need more outcomes for every pound, investing in people who can manage, secure, and continually enhance those platforms is the surest way to square the circle.
Lack of talent, not tools, can create the real bottleneck
For the best part of a decade, we’ve chased platforms, clouds, and APIs. But when a public organisation is asked why a flagship project under-delivered, the culprit often isn’t the kit; it’s capability. Shiny systems won’t deliver return on investment unless the people who run them are on board with the journey. It’s time we treated the public sector’s digital workforce strategy with the same rigour we apply to system procurement.
Get hiring right the first time
Too many projects slow to a crawl because a hire that is “perfect” on paper still – understandably – requires months of extra job-specific training to deliver the unique tasks at hand. By taking a Hire-Train-Deploy approach to digital talent development, the public sector can get the most out of consultancy and ensure it delivers the right skills for the right job.
At mthree, we hire graduates, train them to master the tools your department uses and the skills you need right now, and only then embed them in your team. Public sector organisations can watch talent perform before they commit, mitigating the risks of mis-hires and repeat recruitment costs.
This is something we’ve seen work well across banking, technology, and business, and something the public sector can learn from. For example, we’ve seen 90% of our Alumni talent convert to full-time employees with our clients after 12–24 months on site.
Future-proof the people you’ve already got
Looking at the bigger picture, many existing public sector tech veterans are set to retire over the coming years, certain digital specialists can be eye-watering to hire, and the skills gap is only widening as technology evolves. This creates the case for reskilling and upskilling existing workforces to plug gaps before they become escalating issues.
Take the Tier one investment bank that put 802 production and application support employees through a five-day site-reliability boot camp with us, delivered through a blend of in-person and online instructor-led sessions. Skills refreshed, morale up, institutional memory intact.
Invest in people with the same discipline you invest in tech
Systems will always need updating, and new platforms will keep launching to market. But unless we budget for adaptable talent pipelines, continuous reskilling, and enterprise-wide AI fluency, tomorrow’s workforce ‘kit’ will stall just like yesterday’s. Taking a Hire-Train-Deploy approach to recruitment, delivering data-driven reskill sprints, and implementing cross-disciplinary AI education can give the public sector a self-renewing digital workforce that can meet whatever challenges come next. That, I’d argue, is the smartest pound any department can spend.
Christian Bathews is government lead at talent and training partner, mthree.
