2021 Annual Report: explanatory notes

News item | 01-09-2022 | 16:33

Every year we provide a concise overview of our annual report, containing figures and links to the highlights. Here is a summary of the main developments at the Academy in 2021.

Shaping our vision on learning and development

In 2020 we set out our vision on learning and development and in 2021 we focused our energies on making it happen. Based on this vision, how can we help to make BZ a leading and relevant organisation in the international sphere by 2030? What does it actually mean for BZ to be a learning organisation? What is the current state of our learning potential in regard to what is already happening within the organisation, and where can we still encourage learning? We have moved ahead in each of our three roles. We are a strong Provider of learning activities. We also offer Platforms for knowledge networks, and we are a Compass that steers our ministry in the direction of necessary and relevant trends in learning and development.

The Academy as Provider

The Academy looks back on its second online learning year since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Online learning was no longer new and evidently here to stay, so we invested in updating the IT infrastructure for remote learning. We also renewed the website to make our learning activities more accessible and began preparations for acquiring and implementing a new learning management system in 2022. In 2022 we will continue making online and hybrid learning more professional.

Figures for our learning activities in 2021:

We offered 331 different learning activities in 2021, as compared with 323 in 2020. Of the 331 learning activities, 52 were part of the international and diplomatic curriculum that was open to all civil servants working in international roles. We also offered 134 activities specifically geared to staff at BZ (themes such as diversity & inclusion (D&I), intercultural skills and language courses) and 132 online courses on general topics (e.g. Excel, Scrum, giving and receiving feedback, and fitness and vitality).

It is striking that we organised only 13 lectures in 2021 – considerably fewer than the 80 provided on average in previous years. After the first pandemic year we needed to find a suitable new form for the well-attended current events lectures. Since the Academy team was short-staffed due to several unfilled vacancies, 13 high-quality lectures were the maximum achievable in 2021. At the end of the year we gave the organisation of lectures a fresh boost and expect to be able to offer our average number of lectures again in 2022.

In 2021 we also continued our strategy of ‘online working and online learning’, although hybrid and in-person learning activities were gradually becoming possible again. In 2020 we discovered that online learning is highly inclusive, and because of this, it also helps us to achieve BZ’s goals on D&I. Participation in Academy activities among mission staff was significantly higher than in previous years: 4,119 (45% of the total take-up). In addition to the 4,672 participants from BZ there were also 330 participants (4%) from outside the ministry. We are striving to increase this percentage in the years ahead through partnerships with the ministries of Defence; Economic Affairs & Climate Policy; and Agriculture, Nature & Food Quality. All in all, we are proud to have welcomed staff from other central government bodies 9,121 times to one of our virtual or physical classrooms in 2021.

Where we identified new learning needs, we responded with a new learning activity. In 2021 we launched a lectures series about COVID-19, including a talk on vaccine diplomacy, which was very well received. We also organised more learning activities about climate issues, for which demand remains high. To align our courses more effectively to this and other strategic policy themes for BZ, we are stepping up our collaboration with the Strategic Policy Unit (ESA). The courses on intercultural skills were revised and updated in 2021. We also launched a new course on regional policy for Latin America and the Caribbean: essential if you need to be up to date on the political and economic developments in this region. Inclusion Plaza – which was launched in 2020 – was updated and supplemented with new courses for managers. And to make the entire curriculum more inclusive, we provided a wider range of courses in English. We are aiming to expand the number of learning activities given in other languages than Dutch.

To help our colleagues make the right learning choices and to lower the ‘learning threshold’ we decided in 2021, based on the successful 2020 pilot, to further expand the Academy’s learning pathways. In 2022 we will be launching several learning pathways for a wide range of job groups.

The Academy as Platform

Our role as platform is less easy to illustrate with concrete examples because it is an integral part of everything we do. Learning from and with each other is key. In every learning activity organised in 2021, every conversation with other colleagues, course suppliers or fellow professionals in our field, we tried wherever possible to acquire, share and manage knowledge. Wherever we saw opportunities, we worked to enlarge the BZ learning network. In the future, we would like these efforts to be supported by an actual, online platform.

Policy & Science Committee

The Academy is also represented on the Policy & Science Committee by its Head, Mirella van de Noort. Every year, the committee grants up to two BZ staff members one year of research leave for combining work at BZ with doctoral research. In 2021, research leave was granted to several applicants.

The Academy as Compass

In our role as learning compass we steer our ministry in the direction of necessary and relevant trends in learning and development, and we promote an open learning climate. The Academy cannot create an effective learning climate on its own. That is the collective responsibility of the organisation as a whole. Collaboration with both internal and external partners is essential. Within BZ, this means being more closely involved in the transition of our Human Resources department (HDPO). In 2021 we actively participated in the transition sessions, especially with a view to embedding learning and development in HR policy as effectively as possible. Outside our own ministry, we stepped up our partnership with the Ministry of Defence. Both sides see scope for making their learning activities accessible to staff from both ministries. Examples include certain modules from the training programme for new policy officers at BZ (IBBZ), the Strategic Foresight programme, or public lecture series. Target date: 2022.

In the context of interministerial collaboration in 2021, we also worked closely with the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy and the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality. We jointly developed a quick reference guide to learning activities to support mutual exchange of knowledge and experience among civil servants with economic roles working in an international context.

Operational management in brief

Staff establishment
Our team grew in 2021 from 19 to 23 full-time equivalents. The male-female balance remained roughly the same: the percentage of women dropped from 62.5% to 60% (and conversely the percentage of men increased from 37.5% to 40 %).
Finances
The Academy’s budget for 2021 was €3,250,000. Our income from course fees was €120,600. In 2021 our expenditure was €3,334,483, so we underspent by €36,117.
Social media
In 2021 we significantly enhanced our social media presence on LinkedIn, which gave us 16% more followers, and 71,000 views to 46 posts. Despite the minimum capacity for Twitter (only 11 tweets) our followers increased by 19%. We have no reliable data on views or visitor numbers for our new website.

If you have any questions about our report or would like additional information, please contact us. We would be happy to provide additional information or figures where possible.