Not only is it important for governments to plan for ageing societies but it is also important for public servants to adjust to the rapidly changing nature of governance with a smaller workforce to draw on. AI might help overcome some productivity gaps that occur because of a shrinking workforce, but governments still need to rethink their administrative setups to grapple with this forthcoming challenge. These could include rethinking civil sector pay and allowing for hiring and retention of workers from the private sector.
As a large number of civil servants retire and societal needs evolve, the greatest challenge will be to maintain high-quality public services with a shrinking workforce. Adapting to these changes is difficult at the best of times, but with fewer staff and rising demand, it becomes especially critical.
Thinking about the implications of ageing in the civil service is important since they play an outsized role in shaping society and economies—from impacting the types of products we consume to devising and enforcing complex antitrust laws, and implementing policies around climate change, artificial intelligence (AI), data protection, and more. Effectively empowered public servants can fundamentally transform lives, but to do so, they need the right tools and support.
In the OECD, for example, there are more workers older than 55 years than under 34 years, a trend most prominently seen in Italy and Spain. The UK had a series of recruitment freezes in the 2010s, which shrunk the size of under 34-year-olds in the civil service, exacerbating this challenge.
There are multiple consequences of having an older civil service. It reduces the scope for new ideas and fresh talent coming into government and increases departmental dependence on a few senior civil servants to retrain institutional knowledge.
This is not necessarily a challenge, but in the absence of upskilling and training mechanisms to share knowledge across generations, valuable insights can get lost, an issue highlighted by the UK Cabinet office. The UK’s Public Accounts Committee flags low pay and a lack of mechanisms to track and improve productivity as key reasons for workforce attrition within the UK civil service.
Germany’s civil service, which will shrink by about 30% by 2030, is already causing severe strain on basic public services, but also undermines the country’s business environment. This is seen in the long delays in obtaining approvals and permits for basic items like marriage certificates to even hiring foreign talent needed to power the economy.
This, compounded with a population more averse to migration, leaves Germany facing chronic labour shortages across its economy. This will not only impact the federal government, but local governments even more, given that they bear the brunt of frontline delivery of public services.
One purported solution is to invest heavily in AI and digitisation to make government tasks more efficient and enable the existing civil service to spend time on more strategic tasks. In recent years, there have been successes in using AI to address governance concerns in Germany.
However, these initiatives take time to expand because an ageing civil service is less open to using AI or feeling empowered to do so, and a more intangible factor, Germany’s love for paper-bureaucracy.
More broadly, as various countries face the prospect of shrinking civil services, empowering and training government servants to use tools like AI is critical. The US Bureau of Labour Statistics saved nearly a month of employee time by using AI to code and map the results to a complicated survey that the agency used to run.
While the process would normally take 25,000 employee hours, with AI, it took 1 day. However, for AI to be effective, civil servants need to feel empowered to do so. A report by Apolitical highlights that over 53% of polled civil servants feel that they are not empowered to use AI effectively.
The bigger question worth asking is how governments can manage such a complex transition internally while maintaining and updating the type of delivery expected of citizens. This requires a fundamental rethink, given a shrinking pool of younger employees to work with.
While AI will play an important role in improving productivity gaps, it is not enough. Retraining and retaining existing employees is an interim step, but this must be complemented with efforts to get lateral hires from outside government to join—a tough task given the complexities around civil service recruitment.
Nonetheless, ageing both in societies and the civil service is an important challenge that governments must be able to tackle head on, and soon.
The author is a policy advisor at WisdomCircle, an age-tech platform.
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