Entry-level opportunities

• Specialized recruitment programs
• Information Technology Apprenticeship Program
• Digital Careers for Persons with Disabilities

Join as a student

A great way to gain experience in the public service is by working as a student.

Students bring innovation, diversity, and high energy to the public sector. In a student’s role, you will benefit from:

• work-life balance
• ample development opportunities
• competitive salaries
• benefits
• pension
• opportunities to apply for positions throughout the country
• networking events

You also have the opportunity to apply for positions throughout the country and attend various events to develop transferable skills and a network to help you throughout your career. 

If you are a student currently enrolled in a secondary or post-secondary institution, or if you are a recent graduate, you can apply to work for the Government of Canada through one of the following specialized programs:

• Federal Student Work Experience Program
• Post-Secondary Co-op/Internship Program
• Research Affiliate Program
• Public service student recruitment programs

Applying for public service jobs

In this section:

• Information Technology work streams
• Qualification standards
• Pay
• Roles

Information Technology (IT) work streams

In the federal public service, jobs are organized into occupational groups.

The IT occupational group covers all IT positions.

Most IT work is organized into eight standardized work streams.

• IT Business Line Advisory Services

  Responsible for:

  • providing specialized IT guidance
  • working with clients or suppliers to ensure that innovative and reliable IT resources are available to support the government’s business objectives

  Has expertise in one or more of the following functional areas:

  • IT business analysis
  • client portfolio management
  • project portfolio management
  • supplier relationship management
• IT Database Management

  Responsible for:

  • developing and maintaining data models and related databases
  • performing database design, database capacity planning, database performance management and tuning, data modelling
  • ensuring data security and recovery
• IT Enterprise Architecture

  Responsible for:

  • developing, managing and communicating the departmental IT architecture program and direction
  • working directly with IT leadership and employees in other work streams
  • conducting research into emerging technologies
  • supporting the definition of the future state of IT to meet business requirements
• IT Infrastructure Operations

  Responsible for:

  • deploying and managing the portions of computing infrastructure that are not provided by internal or external service providers, including:
    • networks
    • mainframes
    • servers
    • storage devices
  • providing IT help desk support to clients
  • in smaller organizations, may also be responsible for the client and supplier interface
• IT Planning and Reporting

  Responsible for:

  • providing specialized IT planning guidance.
  • working directly with other members of IT management in the creation of planning deliverables, such as:
    • IT strategic plans that are aligned with business-line objectives
    • departmental IT-related policies and standards
    • IT governance processes
• IT Project Portfolio Management

  Responsible for:

  • working full-time on large, formal projects, portfolios, or programs of projects, that – due to their important and/or complex nature – require the rigorous application of IT project management skills and IT knowledge
  • providing project management expertise and services for projects internal to IT for major projects or initiatives
• IT Security

  Responsible for:

  • providing specialized IT security guidance to ensure the availability, integrity and confidentiality of government information and assets, such as:
    • IT infrastructure
    • business applications
    • data
  • developing and implementing in-house custom security applications, strategies, policies, processes and risk management frameworks
• IT Software Solutions

  Responsible for:

  • developing and/or maintaining all custom or proprietary applications and commercial off-the-shelf applications
  • performing activities to ensure the delivery and support of business applications, including:
    • systems design and development
    • systems and business analysis
    • programming
    • configuration
    • testing and implementation

Qualification standards

The minimum standard of education for the information technology (IT) occupational group is provided on the Qualification standards page. As a job posting may list specific requirements for a position that go beyond these standards, it is important that you review the requirements carefully when applying for an IT position.

Pay

There are five levels of jobs in the IT world – IT-01 to IT-05. Each level has set rates of pay.

Computer Systems (CS) group annual rates of pay

Note: The CS occupational group recently became the IT occupational group. This change does not affect the rates of pay. For example, a CS-01 rate of pay applies to an IT-01, a CS-02 rate of pay applies to an IT-02 and so on. With regard to rates of pay, the CS occupational group will still be referred to until a new collective agreement is negotiated.

The professionals from this occupational group are represented by the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC).

Roles

Although the minimum education standard is the same for all five levels, the amount of knowledge required increases as you progress through each level. The following summaries provide a general idea of the roles for each level and the types of work.

• Information and Data Strategy and Direction

  Responsible for:

  • developing, managing and communicating direction (policies and strategies) for the stewardship and management of information and data assets as part of providing digital services
  • establishing, supporting and participating in governance bodies intended to assess the progress of applicable service and digital frameworks
  • anticipating future needs aimed at the transformation of delivery of services by conducting research and extensive consultation on emerging knowledge in the domain of information and/or data management
  • establishing standards for information and data management solutions by investigating emerging techniques and technologies
  • providing expert advisory services to business lines in order to bring focus and coherence to:
    • the management of information and data across the organization
    • the configuration, deployment and maintenance of machine information or data management solutions and products
  • raising awareness of information and data as a valuable business asset through communication and advocacy
    or
    establishing, developing, promoting and maintaining a collection of resources that raise awareness and train a work force to enable:
    • organizational transformation to a digital way of working
    • stewardship of information and data assets
  • having additional expertise in Change Management
• Information and Data Architecture

  Responsible for:

  • developing, managing and communicating departmental information and data architectures that establish a unified:
    • context of an organization’s information and data holdings
    • digital end-user experience
    • design for interoperable solutions
    • analytical reporting
    • legislative compliance
  • working directly with Enterprise Architecture and employees in other work streams to:
    • interpret the needs of both the organization and the business line
    • translate those needs into data and information system requirements
  • having additional expertise in one or more of the following functional areas:
    • business analysis
    • user experience design
    • solutions design

  Data Architects have expertise in;

  • evaluating and maintaining  existing architectures;
  • Develop new architectures as business requirements warrants;
  • Maintaiingn database security;
  • Working with Data Governance team to define, plan and analyze data architecture framework including security, reference data, metadata, and master data;
  • Supporting to in the development, implementation and creation of Data management processes and procedures;
  • Working with Data Governance team and data science teams to devise and implement data strategies, build models and assess stakeholder needs
  • Researching data acquisition opportunities;
  • Developing application programming Interfaces (API)s to retrieve data
• Information Operations

  Responsible for:

  • services undertaken to achieve efficient and effective application of life-cycle management practices of records and documents in systems that manage information and/or records offices for business purposes, legal obligations, or both.
  • working with information technology professionals and clients to ensure sound application of information authorities, responsibilities and policies

• Data Systems Operations

  Responsible for:

  • Design, backup, transition and secure databases and ensure all connections to all legacy systems remain intact;
  • Update databases by granting and renewing permissions for database access;
  • Perform software updates, write new SQL code and update the systems and programming languages associated to the databases;
  • Organize and maintain data in the Database to support Data Analysts;
  • Design and develop Databases;
  • Archive and dispose data along its entire lifecycle;
  • Maintain and troubleshoot databases and install, update and manage Database Management systems;
  • Improve data security;
  • Create Database Documentation to support end users to how to use database securely;
  • Train others in Database Management;
  • Perform database backup and recovery;
  • Plan for future growth of database systems;
  • developing and implementing and maintaining the foundations of database systems and its architecture;
  • Planing, developing, , testing and maintaining Data Architectures, databases and large scale processing systems  and aligns them to business requirements;
  • Ensuring data is accessible to all parts of the organization to enable and support all users;
  • Working with Data Analysts to collect, manage and convert raw data into information for interpretation by Data Analysts;
  • maintaining optimized data in databases and data warehouses;
  • Supporting Data Scientists to construct dataset procedures to assist with data mining, modelling and product;
• Data Science and Analytics

  Responsible for:

  • portraying information in an accurate, informative, and digestible manner
  • using various tools and processes, such as charts, graphs, maps and dashboards, in support of Storytelling with Data to help others visualize trends, outliers and patterns in data
  • establishing standards around data analytics and data science solutions and responsible artificial intelligence
  • supporting the building, deployment and maintenance of machine learning models and analytical products
  • leads others in the investigation of new and emerging techniques.
  • having expertise in one or more of the following functional areas:
    • Statistics
    • Mathematics
    • Predictive analytics
  • Machine learning
  • recognizing patterns and trends within data to identify relationships and to generate insights
  • using a variety of software, tools, methods and processes to access, manipulate, query and analyze data
  • translating data and information into an accessible format to aid others in seeing and understanding these trends, outliers, or patterns in data

  Data Analytics have expertise in:

  • Specialization in specific business contexts may lead to Business Intelligence Analyst in those specific domains such as HR, finance, Labour, Economics, Real Property, ETC. (job description not yet defined;
    • Specialization in Mathematical, statistical, algorithmic and data modelling for predictive analysis, descriptive analysis, prescriptive analysis, regression analysis ETC. may lead to Data Science jobs.

Becoming a digital executive

Executives take on a strategic management role and mobilize individuals to obtain objectives and goals. This includes leading teams through subordinate managers, acting as strategic business advisors to senior management in the organization, and contributing to the promotion and implementation of priority organizational initiatives.

To lead effectively, executives are required to:

• meet minimum qualification standards
• demonstrate key leadership competencies

Learning and development

The public service offers learning and development opportunities to support government executives through:

• the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS)
• the CSPS Digital Academy
• Association of Professional Executives of the Public Service of Canada (APEX)
• ad hoc event and learning sessions