Does E-government Education Meet Competency Requirements? An Analysis of the German University System from International Perspective

Abstract

Necessary competencies in the context of egovernment and the lack thereof have received some academic attention in the last years. Questions remain, whether study programs for public administration pick up the topic, how it is conceptualized and taught in order to develop e-government competencies.

The Tale of e-Government: A Review of the Stories that Have Been Told So Far and What is Yet to Come

“…This topic is also apparently too young in terms of appearance in scientific contributions. Though being a necessary prerequisite for successful eGovernment implementation, providing for more efficiency and effectiveness, it has gained limited attention so far, except for recent ventures like [13,27,28].…”

Let’s Play … eGovernment! A Simulation Game for Competence Development among Public Administration Students

“…As elaborated before, it is especially the targeted competence provision that falls short of expectations in the design of eGovernment curricula and does not meet the actual demands [24,39,40]. Furthermore, "[…] in many cases, the inclusion of innovation in HRM policies and practices does not often extend beyond a passing reference and does not expand in detail the specific skills and capabilities needed."…”

“…A promising approach to structure eGovernment education by gathering and deriving competence categories from scientific literature has been made by [24]. Table 1 summarizes their identified competence categories: technical, socio-technical, organisational, managerial and political-administrative competences, exemplifying different characteristics.…”

“…The game primarily targets the competence provision of public administration students. Competences that currently are insufficiently addressed with common study programs are covered with the simulation game [24,40] as is depicted in table 2. Research on public administration employees and the implementation of IT projects revealed various issues such as resistance to IT-related projects [21], and legal issues [8,21].…”

“…By means of the different elements and the scenario in which the students are put, we intend to create a learning environment that is as close to the eGovernment reality in Germany as possible in order to shape the competences, public servants should ideally master. We oriented ourselves on the competence categories by [24], leaving out the technical competence category, as was mentioned before and instead adding soft skills to the mix of needed competences, as identified by [5,33]. Table 2 comprises the different elements of the game and the respective competences addressed by those elements.…”