Use your expertise, develop your career: join the tech team working on the UK’s biggest IT projects | Digital careers with purpose

When Craig Eblett joined the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) from the private sector more than 20 years ago, he admits it was a bit of a shock. “I’d come from an organisation where we had our own engineers, our own IT department and we used to just get things done,” he says. “DWP was very different.” But Eblett, who is now director of digital delivery for shared platforms, says the transformation he’s seen over the past two decades has been remarkable.

“We’ve been on a massive journey. We have around 4,000 people now [in DWP Digital], including highly skilled engineers, user researchers and agile delivery leads to make sure we have full control over delivering great digital products and services to the organisation and to the country.”

That in-house expertise was vital when the Covid-19 pandemic hit in 2020. DWP Digital had to ensure that all DWP services remained secure and stable for its 20 million customers, even as those colleagues who could, moved to work from home. An estimated 10,000 rapid IT changes were rolled out, and the universal credit digital service was bolstered to deal with more than 10 times the usual number of claims.

The experience marked a step change in a transformation journey that’s believed to be the biggest public sector digital programme of its type in Europe. There are five goals to DWP’s Digital Future strategy – delivering great services, building new user-centred solutions, using new technologies and data to innovate, adopting common approaches to technology components and building capacity and capability. “There’s sometimes a perception in government that everything takes years,” Eblett says. “Now we’ve proven to ourselves and others what DWP Digital can do.”

Nearly 40 projects have been launched recently, one of which created a more convenient way for people to claim child maintenance payments. Instead of a 40-minute phone call with an agent, users can now access online applications 24/7, and spend an average of 18 minutes completing an application. Another service enabled customers to apply for pension credit online, with two thirds of new claims now being made in this way.

Emma Stace leads a new benefits transformation programme. She recently joined DWP Digital, from the Department for Education (DfE), as the digital director for health and disability benefits supporting services. In line with the department’s broader digital mission, the project aims to make the service more streamlined, informed by data, and simple for users to navigate across the benefits that DWP administers, including the personal independence payment.

“With the health assessment service, for example, at the moment users have several assessments related to different benefits. We’re trying to create an assessment that lots of benefits can pull from. It’s a really innovative part of our work,” says Stace. “We’re a large, long-established organisation and we have data across many, many systems. But we want to use data in the right way at the right time to make the best possible decisions, to improve the user experience, and to speed up the process.”

Part of the challenge of realising the ambitions that the Digital Future agenda lays out is building capacity within the team. “We know we can deliver individual products and services in an agile way, but now we want to scale that to deliver much greater benefits faster, across many services,” says Eblett. The department plans to hire more than 1,000 digital specialists such as architects, developers, security experts and more, at its seven digital hub sites across the country (Newcastle, Manchester, Leeds, Blackpool, Birmingham, Sheffield and London). Hybrid working may be an option, with some employees working part of the week in their DWP office and part of the week from home.

It’s a chance to work on some of the country’s biggest IT projects and make a tangible impact, says Eblett, and is “genuinely a nice place to come and use your expertise and develop further with fantastic training. And while there might still be a perception it’s a bit stodgy working in government, the truth is we’re at the cutting edge of some of the newest tools and we’re using them at a huge scale, adding real value.”

There are opportunities to collaborate across departments, too. At DfE, Stace ran a cross-government network of chief digital innovation officers and says she is in regular contact with others to discuss challenges. One tangible example of that working was when HMRC helped DWP verify the identity of people remotely during lockdown, removing the need for face-to-face meetings. “We’re all learning from each other all the time,” says Stace. “It’s a very supportive and welcoming environment. You’re not in direct competition with each other in a way that I’ve experienced working in the private sector. People really help each other out.

“I enjoy the challenge, the complexity, the scale, and the feeling of purpose,” she adds, when thinking about what she likes most about her job. “There’s nothing better than getting something out and it really helping people. That’s very satisfying.”

Ready to make a difference? Find out more about the career opportunities offered by DWP Digital