The Jobhunters Official Blog

By Annelie Caron, Senior Consultant The JobHunters – Federal Government Job Specialists
I always knew the day would come but I told myself, “I’ll worry about it later. Right now, I have research projects to hand in, classes to attend and friends to see.” I eventually I had to face reality – what will I do after graduation?

At the time, I was an undergrad student getting my Bachelor of Arts in Communications. I was working a retail job which helped pay for school – but it did not provide me with any real career opportunities. It was just a gig.  

My train of thought was very linear back then, maybe it was because I had accepted the prescribed way of doing things – get my degree and then go job hunting. I was on this track until I was almost done my BA when another student introduced me to an alternative route – working in my field before I graduate. Yes, I had heard about coop, but I was not even thinking about getting “a real job” – just being in university was more than enough for me to mentally process!

What I learnt from this person through mere word of mouth would jump start my career. It was as though I had been told the inside scoop on how to get into the federal government – the Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP). Although it is a big program, it seemed that not many students knew that it even existed. But thanks to FSWEP, applying to the federal government was actually attainable and not just somewhere job applications – and dreams – went to die.

The application process was easy. To get my name in the general inventory I simply had to log on to jobs.gc.ca in their “Student” section and follow the instructions. I provided basic information about myself, submitted my resume and completed a questionnaire on my skills. I remembered that my friend had shared some helpful tips on how to successfully apply – which I am convinced helped me to get a call. She reminded me that many of the general skills we take for granted from our “student jobs” in the service industry for example, are also skills that the public service looks for in a candidate. Skills like the ability to work with the public, supervise a work team and use a computer. It’s not rocket science but these are basic skills that are also in demand in many government jobs. Since they were my strengths, I made sure to complete the questionnaire and resume with my “people skills” in mind.  Within weeks, I got a call for an interview and was hired as a student!

The pay was OK, but it was the experience and contacts that mattered the most. I had a fabulous mentor who took me under her wing and taught me almost everything I know. I was busy juggling full time studies and working part time but it was manageable. Plus, I worked full time in the summer which helped me to gain a lot of interrupted work experience, and thanks to my mentor, I had a lot of autonomy be innovative in my work.

The best part however, was the amazing graduation present I received – a full time permanent job in the federal government! Thanks to a brilliant idea called “bridging” I was offered a position in my department straight out of university. Today, I am a senior communications adviser. Although I worked hard to get where I am today, I am thankful that I found out about FSWEP before it was too late!

FREE Student Workshop: Get Ahead, Get Started Now™Opportunities for Students in the Federal Government. This workshop is a must for all post-secondary students and recent grads aspiring to one day land a career in the federal public service. This one-hour workshop will explore all the available opportunities for students and will provide valuable insight and tips that will help attendees stay ahead of the competition. August 16, 6-7 p.m. Register now

STUDENT TIP

• The deadline to apply for the federal government’s largest student employment program, the Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP) is October 1, 2010.  Don’t miss your opportunity to learn how to successfully apply!
• To be eligible for the FSWEP you must submit a new application each year, regardless of whether you have applied before or, you have already worked in the federal public service.

Annelie Caron @ The JobHunters

Courtesy of the Toronto Star. For the full story, click here.

Excerpt:

Canada has a proud tradition of embracing equal opportunity and employment equity, dating from the Progressive Conservative governments of John Diefenbaker and Brian Mulroney.

Diefenbaker’s 1960 Bill of Rights helped stem the tide of racial discrimination in this country, though it failed to redress long-standing under-representation of minorities in the public service. Mulroney’s trail-blazing Employment Equity Act of 1986 went further in closing the gap between a largely white public service and an increasingly diversified national workforce.

Now, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have announced they will revisit that legacy of diversity. Fresh from their attack on Statistics Canada, they are embarking on a major review of employment equity in the federal government.

Treasury Board President Stockwell Day, who oversees the public service, has seized on the story of Sara Landriault, a child-care choice advocate whose website shows her posing with Harper. She was told she could not continue an online job application because she is white.

The affirmative action program is clumsy, to say the least, when it refuses to even consider worthy applicants of other backgrounds. The question is what Day and his voluble ally, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, are really up to here. The targeting of specific groups — such as aboriginals, the disabled, visible minorities and women — to the exclusion of other applicants is hardly rampant: of the 5,000 public service jobs posted last year, only 91 were designated for one group, such as aboriginals.

A maladroit web application process can be modified, but that does not mean that the rest of the employment equity philosophy should be discarded, throwing minorities out with the bathwater. If the Tories were to follow up by tweaking the offending measure, fair enough. But look at what Kenney is saying: “All positions should be on the basis of equality of opportunity and merit.”

Courtesy of MinnPost.com. For the full story, click here.

Excerpt:

For Canadians, the economic news this summer has been good.

In June, an impressive 93,000 jobs were created, according to the government agency, Statistics Canada. The job growth amazed economists — they had predicted no more than 20,000 more jobs for the month. The unemployment rate dropped to 7.9 percent, the first time the rate has been below the 8 percent mark since January 2009.

“I’m flabbergasted,” economist Derek Burleton, with the TD bank, told the CBC. “It really does speak to the strength of the domestic economy.”

Courtesy of the Globe and Mail. For the full story, click here.

Excerpt:

After consecutive months of “good news” job reports, few Canadians seem to be aware that special employment insurance stimulus measures announced under Canada’s Economic Action Plan will soon fall off a cliff – the same measures that are currently helping to bolster our troubled economy and keeping families’ heads above water.

The Harper government’s 2009 budget EI measures – which, among other adjustments, added five weeks of EI for all claimants – were only intended to be temporary. After Sept. 11, all new EI claims will be excluded from these extensions. Also terminating shortly after will be the highly successful pilot projects that boost benefits for eligible workers. Other measures such as EI Work Sharing and EI training benefits have already been curtailed.

Haunted by the spectre of a double dip recession, it would be a huge mistake to remove fiscal stimulus through EI benefits when we still need economic oxygen to support this fragile recovery.

Many workers are facing their second or third layoff since 2008. Statistics Canada has just reported that regular EI beneficiaries increased in May for the first time in eight months, to more than 680,000. That’s not reassuring.

Also troubling is that Canada’s long-term unemployed has doubled as a percentage of the country’s total unemployed, prompting a recommendation from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that temporary EI extensions “be maintained until the pool of long-term unemployed begins to drop significantly.” This is good advice to be heeded by a federal government that often appears too quick to consider the economic meltdown a thing of the past. Too many Canadian workers are still in survival mode, forced to rely on precarious, part-time and temp agency jobs.

With little public attention, government is not under pressure to act. Recent experiences in the United States show the damages caused by delay.

Courtesy of the Globe and Mail. For the full story, click here.

Excerpt:

Mission accomplished? Well, almost. With the exception of visible minorities, three of the four groups targeted for equal employment opportunity in Canada’s public sector have exceeded their quota. If current practices and logic prevail then the solution is obvious: simply restrict non visible minorities from applying for cultural specific designated jobs, then we can move on. Or not.

It is precisely this practice of explicitly prohibiting qualified applicants from applying for designated positions if they are not from a targeted group that precipitated the Conservative government’s recent decision to conduct a review of federal hiring policies. I support the review and hope it leads to merit-based promotion policies that improve representation of designated groups into senior management positions and out of entry level ghettos.

While the aggregate numbers may paint a picture of a more representative public sector, scratch beneath the surface and it’s quickly evident that Canada’s public sector fails to reflect the population it serves at senior decision-making levels. So what are the long-term implications to the country if we continue on this path unchecked?

The absence of diversity at senior levels of policy decision-making and implementation results in policies that are incongruent with the realities and needs of Canadians. This leads to wasted opportunities and contributes to increased taxes, since politicians will need to invest more time and money to correct bad policies through patchwork solutions.

The issue is not about hitting a quota – it’s about accessing and unleashing a pool of talent that provides diversity in thinking, problem solving and performance. In today’s environment, public or private, it does not make sense to limit the potential talent that is available from a growing segment of the population. Otherwise we lose the diverse thinking, culture and representation necessary for good policy development.

Thanks to Statistics Canada, we know that between 2001 and 2006 Canada’s visible minority population grew by 27 per cent – five timers faster than the general population. That’s an estimated 5 million people accounting for 16.2 per cent of Canada’s total population. This trend reflects a consistent increase in the country’s visible minority population.

So when Immigration Minister Jason Kenney asked his cabinet colleague Stockwell Day, the President of the Treasury Board, to conduct a review of Canada’s employment equity program to encourage “public-sector employers to ensure the principle of equality of opportunity,” the goal should not simply be about hitting a number. It should be about ensuring hiring policies that provide merit-based equal opportunities to access all levels of the public service. The existing policy needs to be tweaked.

Courtesy of CBC News. For the full story, click here.

Excerpt:

The number of aboriginal people in high-ranking jobs in the Northwest Territories government has gone down since 2003, despite an affirmative action hiring policy, says Human Resources Minister Bob McLeod.

His department is looking at how it can get more aboriginal people into senior management positions, with a goal of going from 16 per cent now to 20 per cent in three years, he said.

“A large part of it was reaffirming our support and continuation of our government’s affirmative action policy,” McLeod said.

Aboriginal women are the least represented group in Northwest Territories executive positions, he said.

Terry Villeneuve, president of the N.W.T. Native Women’s Association, said poverty, education and family duties put higher-level jobs out of reach for many aboriginal women.

Improving representation in a territory, where aboriginal people account for roughly half the population, is overdue, she said.

“There should [be] at least 50 per cent aboriginal employees,” Villeneuve said.

Courtesy of the Vancouver Sun. For the full story, click here.

Excerpt:

Has the solution become more harmful than the problem? That is the strong suggestion behind the recent announcement that the federal government will review its 24-year-old employment equity legislation.

The review was prompted by the case of an Ottawa woman who was appalled to find out that she wasn’t eligible to apply for a job because it was reserved for aboriginal and visible-minority applicants.

In launching the review, Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney said he supports the need for ethnic diversity in the public service, but all Canadians should have “an equal opportunity to work for their government based on merit, regardless of race or ethnicity.”

While we welcome the review of this aging program, it is important to note from the start that the same words have been used to explain why the affirmative action program was needed in the first place.

It was needed because of the sense, borne out by experience and statistics, that hiring and advancement in the public service were not based entirely on merit, that women, aboriginals, people with disabilities and visible minorities had a harder time getting in the door and, once in, a harder time getting ahead.

The review will have no trouble determining that it is wrong for anyone to be denied access to a job because of gender, race or ethnicity.

Neither is there any question about the value of an ethnically diverse public service.

Courtesy of the Calgary Herald. For the full story, click here.

Excerpt:

“E qual opportunity” should mean exactly that, which is why the Conservative government’s decision to examine affirmative action policies mandated by the Public Service Employment Act is so refreshing.

Merit — rather than colour, creed, or gender — should be the ultimate arbiter for just about any employer sifting through applications and is bound to bring better results.

The review, announced by Treasury Board president Stockwell Day and Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Jason Kenney, could hardly have come at a better time. A painfully obvious example of the sort of skewed hiring practices the Act encourages emerged earlier this week.

An Ontario woman named Sara Landriault was hunting for work when she came across a desirable job at Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). However, upon attempting to submit her resume, she was stymied by the system because she is not a member of a visible minority. A CIC spokeswoman blandly dismissed the issue by noting that “We are underrepresented by aboriginal employees in our workforce.” Landriault put it better: “But an equal opportunity employer does not stop one race from applying.”

Hence the contradiction at the heart of affirmative action. The idea was originally intended to remedy historic shortages of women and visible minorities in the workplace and has met with a great deal of success.

So much so, in fact, that this idea is now past its prime, having given rise to the same problem it was designed to combat. Women now hold more public-sector jobs than men, while minorities have never been so well represented. As Landriault’s case amply demonstrates, it is now people outside one or more of these groups who face a tough slog cracking the job market. You can’t fight inequality with more inequality. Now would be a good time to change.

Courtesy of the Toronto Sun. For the full story, click here.

Excerpt:

Should the federal government have jobs that essentially say “whites need not apply”?

That’s the question in Ottawa this week with the Conservative government saying affirmative action programs should encourage women, minorities, the disabled and aboriginals to apply for jobs but not exclude others based on race.

The opposition parties see things differently.

Campaigning in Quebec, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff blasted the government’s call to review a policy that sets aside some jobs for certain races.

“We cannot understand why Mr. Harper keeps creating problems where there aren’t any,” said Ignatieff. “Public sector hiring should be based on merit, but it should also be based on giving everybody an equal shot.”

But that’s exactly what the government says it wants to do – give everyone an equal shot at government work.