About the 2024 Student Experience Survey

Goal

The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat (TBS) has been administering the annual Student Experience Survey (SES) since 2017 to collect information from students about their employment experiences in the federal public service.

The survey provides a snapshot of students’ work experiences in their current organization. The data collected helps guide future strategies aimed at improving the orientation process and ensuring that students are provided with meaningful learning opportunities.

The SES asks questions about:

• recruitment
• onboarding and orientation
• work experience
• accommodations
• workplace well-being
• employment in the federal public service
• pay
• general information (self-identification)

Timing

The SES will be administered for a period of 6 weeks towards the end of the summer student work term, from August 6 to September 13, 2024.

Survey administrator

TBS is responsible for administering the SES using the survey software SimpleSurvey.

Eligibility

Students are eligible to take part in the SES if hired for a summer work term through:

• a student employee program (Federal Student Work Experience Program (FSWEP)
• Post-secondary Co-operative Education and Internship Program (CO-OP/Internship)
• Research Affiliate Program (RAP)
• any other student program

Student employees whose work terms get extended or get rehired for a following work term are also eligible to take part.

Confidentiality

The Privacy Act protects survey responses. No data gets released that can trace back to respondents.

To protect peoples’ identities and keep their answers confidential:

• responses are grouped together so as not to be attributable to an individual
• data from questions having fewer than 10 respondents is not published
• individual responses are never published or shared with government departments or agencies

Survey results

Participating organizations receive survey results in early winter. Departments and agencies receive a combined dataset of their results, with proper suppression rules applied for small respondent counts.