Empowering Excellence
Newsletter | June 2024 | 1st edition
Strengthening Official Languages: Audit insight
While our second System-Wide Staffing Audit found high compliance with staffing requirements, departments and agencies need to implement measures to tackle ongoing issues related to official languages obligations in the staffing process and report on their progress to the PSC.
Deep dive into staffing and diversity: the data you need
Where does your organization stand? Explore the Staffing and Non-Partisanship Survey results to help improve your staffing strategies. This year’s survey included new questions assessing perceptions of biases and barriers in staffing processes that affect equity-seeking groups, helping you identify gaps or areas requiring attention.
Making the Federal Student Work Experience Program more agile
We heard you, and we’re innovating. Eight organizations are testing a flexible approach to recruit specific students to the Federal Student Work Experience Program, including students who are:
- members of an employment equity group
- located remotely
- in a specialized field of study
The Specific Name Referral pilot will onboard more organizations this summer, with the goal of full adoption within the next year.
Cutting wait times: second language testing
With the modernized Official Languages Act, we’re boosting capacity to meet increased demand for our oral second language tests. We’re also exploring innovative solutions to address surge demand, including portable departmental tests, a self-serve automated scheduling system, and the use of technology to enhance testing robustness. We believe this will improve user experience and time to staff.
Political activities as a public servant
Thanks to those of you who sent a reminder to all employees about the requirement to seek PSC permission before engaging in candidacy-related activities in any election.
Through onboarding processes and values and ethics discussions, continued engagement with employees on their rights and obligations will help protect our non-partisan public service. To guide these discussions and help employees make informed decisions about political activities, they can refer to the PSC’s Political Activities Self-Assessment Tool.
This is of particular importance with a federal election on the horizon.
Non-advertised processes: focus on clarity and transparency
While departments and agencies continue to meet policy and legislative requirements when using non-advertised appointment processes, we lack data on how they’re being used.
For this reason, we’re:
- increasing our data on the reasons for non-advertised processes, including tracking those from pools and inventories
- enhancing transparency of non-advertised processes for employees
- reinforcing our guidance to ensure clarity on factors influencing decisions on the choice of advertised versus non-advertised