Human Capital and Digital Government: Evidence from Germany, Australia, and New Zealand

The slow progress of digital transformation in public organizations has been a source of concern, not least due to a lack of digital government competences (DGCs). We approach the persisting issue by drawing on resource-based theory and human capital. We conceptualize DGCs as knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics (KSAOs), which compose digital government-related human capital resources. We further posit that a lack of such resources on the individual level negatively impacts transformation capabilities on the organizational level. To substantiate our claims, we perform a competence assessment based on job advertisements. We analyzed 2,869 job ads from local governments in Germany, Australia, and New Zealand using a job-mining approach that combines large language models and topic modeling. Our findings reveal that DGCs are notably scarce in these job ads, which helps explain the slow progress of digital government pursuit. Our study contributes to research by providing a novel theoretical foundation for the literature stream on DGCs, framing them as KSAOs as the foundation for human capital resources. We also share our job-mining pipeline for replication and adaptation by other researchers. Finally, we propose four action points to address the challenges from a hiring perspective.