Ukraine’s signing of the association agreement with the EU determines the necessity to harmonize national approaches to the development of e-government with European standards and requirements. In turn, this necessitates the creation and use of effective mechanisms for the formation and development of the necessary ICT competencies (ICT – information and communication technologies) and e-government skills in all those involved in this area. And one of the key problems in the proper implementation of e-government is the relatively low level of ICT competence of public officials.

In the modern public service of Ukraine there is a necessity for a comprehensive understanding of both the content of ICT competence and the process of its formation and development. Without ICT competence and many other professionally important qualities, it is impossible to form the professionalism of public administration management staff.

However, to this day in Ukraine there is no known European standards in the field of e-competences ICT profiles and classification of professions in the field of knowledge «Information technology» is not correlated with the National Qualifications Framework (NQF) and the framework of e-competence (European -Competence Framework) and, as a consequence, there is no legal definition of ICT – the competence of IT professionals in general and, in particular, public officials dealing with e-government.

Institutional mechanisms of formation and development of ICT competence of public officials operate at national, regional and local levels. The priority direction of the organization of personnel policy is the creation of an effective mechanism for training and attracting highly qualified IT specialists to work in the public service, ensuring the competitiveness of the public service in the labor market.

The main stages of training of civil officials in the field of ICT usage are: creation and development of infrastructure of regional centers for training and advanced training of public officials in the field of ICT, development of necessary methodological materials, professional training and certification of training results for qualification requirements for ICT competence of public officials.

Therefore, the solution of the problem of formation of e-government skills of public officials to ensure effective public administration is possible, first of all, on the basis of determining the qualification characteristics of such training. The substantiation of the methodology of formation of qualification requirements for ICT competence of public officials is the basis for the development of unified procedures for assessing the qualification skills of employees in the field of e-government.

The more cost-effective is the centralized approach to training, retraining and advanced training of civil officials, according to which the training of public officials is carried out according to unified programs on the basis of one or more educational institutions, specialized centers of advanced training. Its weaknesses are the inability to take into account all the peculiarities of the activities of various public authorities, the inertia of adjusting the educational process to the dynamic changes taking place in government on e-government, lack of practical orientation and so on.

At the same time, the capacity of master's degrees in e-government does not solve the problem of mass training of public officials in e-government skills.

Mass training of public officials in e-government and e-democracy should be organized on the basis of the existing system of retraining and advanced training of public officials, first of all, those components that function in the National Academy of Public Administration under the President of Ukraine (NAPA) and its regional institutes, who have significant experience in training various categories of civil officials in short-term (medium-term) programs and the necessary material and technical base, including from distance learning. A significant advantage of this approach is the possibility of applying many years of experience in the network of regional centers for retraining and advanced training of civil officials, the developed state mechanisms and resources of these centers. The problem is that they do not have the necessary standardized educational and methodological documentation, financial support, trained teachers on retraining and advanced training of public officials in e-government and e-democracy.

The priority system-creating factor in the functioning of the e-government system is the human capital of society, especially the readiness of public managers for e-government. The main problem - in the subjective factor - the qualifications and attitudes of public officials to the implementation of e-government technologies, the lack of a critical mass of professionals who are well versed in IT technologies.