How government work is changing
The government work-shift map
How the tasks of 8 government job families change between 2026 and 2030: what gets automated, what gets augmented, what is new and what stays human. For each family: the rising skills, and what a manager can do now.
Qualitative bands only, no automation percentages.Editorial estimate
Policy analyst
Moves from gathering and summarising information to testing options with data and weighing their consequences for beneficiaries.
A signal from a published source: The OECD Digital Government Policy Framework names a “data-driven public sector” as one of 6 dimensions of a digital government.
How the tasks change, 2026–2030
Automated
Routine tasks systems are likely to take over, with human review.
- Compiling references and international practice into a first summary
- Summarising long studies and reports
- Drafting first-pass comparison tables across countries and entities
Augmented
Tasks where the employee stays responsible and tools speed the work.
- Analysing data to support policy options
- Drafting and revising policy papers
- Tracking public response to proposals
- Checking a proposal against existing regulations
New
New tasks the transformation itself creates.
- Checking generative AI output before it enters a policy paper
- Designing small pilots to test a policy before scaling it
- Assessing algorithms that support public decisions
Stays human
Tasks built on judgment, relationships and accountability.
- Balancing competing interests and proposing a compromise
- Consulting stakeholders and building consensus
- Judging what is fair and socially acceptable
Rising skills
- Reading data and its limitsAI & Data
- Digital legislation awarenessPolicy & Governance
- Storytelling with dataLeadership
Related digital roles
What a manager can do now
- Require every policy paper to cite the source of each figure and who checked it.
- Give analysts time to practise data analysis with the entity’s own tools.
- Pilot one policy this year at small scale before rolling it out.
How to read this map
- Placing tasks in the four lanes is an editorial reading of published trends, not a measurement of any entity or job.
- Matching government job families to the international classification of occupations is approximate, and tasks differ from one entity to another.
- “Automated” does not mean the job disappears; it means a specific task moves to systems while human review remains.