Research estimates that COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation of organizations by up to six years. This includes not only the technology, but also the cultural components that surround the technology, such as a willingness to supervise employees remotely and in stronger organizations, the innovation capacity to develop rapid response strategies with incomplete information.
But the pandemic has also set women’s employment equality back - some estimate by decades. People in vulnerable employment situations, such as LGBTQ2+ workers and immigrant communities, have been heavily impacted.
While living in an age of disruption can bring disadvantages and challenges, it also brings opportunity. It’s historically very rare for such a massive volume of businesses, governments and people to be in a position to adopt new behaviours and new operating models at the same time. While not all will look to (or be in a position to) adopt the same changes, this condition of massive social flux provides a rare (albeit unsought) chance to do things differently going forward. Significantly differently.
This window of opportunity also extends to the Government of Canada’s recruitment and talent mobility model. The world is changing, and with this comes an opportunity to be bold in reaching for stronger, better, more resilient models that can adapt as societies evolve... Models that aim to do more than simply meet the needs of Government... Models that proactively generate better diversity and inclusion outcomes, pioneer the future of public service work, and drive the talent engine for the kind of digital government that the Government of Canada aspires to become.
Talent Cloud’s research opens up new potential directions for the Government of Canada’s talent engine - directions that can leverage the current change environment to advance the transformation of digital government, and build a more inclusive, diverse public service.
This section takes a look at lessons learned from two of the extra projects Talent Cloud took on:
It also identifies promising areas for future research, and some thoughts on what Talent Cloud could do if it was resourced to continue as a project beyond March 2021:
As a final wrap up, this section includes a few final thoughts from the team on:
