When the Talent Cloud project first launched, the rise of the digital age was a big subject of discussion, and the economic impact of companies like Uber and AirBnB was only just beginning to be understood. In 2017, “gig” or project-based work was estimated to account for ~20-25% of employment opportunities in Canada and was the fastest growing type of employment. The “platform revolution” was underway, but its trajectory was uncertain. How would the platform revolution change business, and with it, the nature of work? Would the rising “gig” economy continue to grow until the majority of jobs were project-based or micro-contracting employment opportunities or would it hit a ceiling and level off… or was it just a passing economic fad?
Alongside this, there was (and still is) an increasing global dependency on technology to complete a wider range of tasks, including those in industries that had previously been relatively untouched. Globally, this was leading to fierce competition over people with the skills required to drive organizations forward in the digital age. Added to this were predictions about demographic labour market changes, and a growing social movement towards greater inclusion and diversity, represented across organizations and in positions of authority.
For many organizations, their human resources models were designed in and for earlier times. The Government of Canada is no exception.
Many of the foundational pieces of legislation for government human resources date to the 1980s, and much of the policy is rooted in decisions made in the 1990s. To put this time period in perspective, many Government of Canada departments were still in the process of replacing analogue paper processes and giving employees computers and internet access. Understandably, much of this legislation and policy didn’t envision a scope that included the rise of the gig economy and the digital age, and the policy suite was therefore not optimized to support government operations during these socio-economic and technological developments.
The broad problem Talent Cloud was interested in was how to develop a digital age talent engine to bring employees with digital skills into government.
But more specifically, Talent Cloud was concerned with how long timelines and labour intensive HR processes were impacting the Government of Canada’s ability to remain competitive in the digital skills talent market. Government was heavily invested in a workforce that was largely made up of permanent (indeterminate) employees in an economic ecosystem where a rising number of workers reported wanting more self-directed career choices and greater job mobility. That said, the broader gig economy didn’t widely support workers’ rights, like pension, benefits and union representation, which opened the door to an economic engine where the vulnerable were made more vulnerable.
Talent Cloud wanted to work on the problem of how to build a functioning “gig” or project-based ecosystem for the Government of Canada, complete with workers’ rights - a model that moved fast enough to be competitive against the private sector and was attractive to top digital and tech talent.
