Now that you better understand yourself, you need to understand what types of jobs the federal government has if you want to figure out what type of job you are seeking. As with the previous chapter, there are two large perspectives to think about: functional classifications and departmental roles.

Functional classification

Generally speaking, there are five types of jobs in the federal government:

Management	Enabling Service Administration
Policy development and program design	Specialist categories
Program management / service delivery

Let’s talk a bit about each of those, as it will help you figure out what interests you. We can eliminate two from consideration pretty fast – management and specialists.

For management, the public service is pretty similar to the private sector – people aren’t usually hired into management positions unless they already have experience at lower levels in the same field or industry. Which means most departments don’t usually hire management people off the street – they promote former analysts, program managers, and administrators who have experience in policy, programs, or administration. This leaves the rare individual who is able to jump in from outside and take over a management position without ever having managed policy development, government programs, or enabling services, all of which have a myriad of rules, procedures, and regulations that don’t exist in the private sector. In addition, Executive competitions are very different from the rest of the positions addressed by the techniques you’ll find in the subsequent sections. If that’s your niche, what you are trying to do, this book will likely be too general for your unique situation. 

Equally, the needs of specialists are also not likely to be completely met by this book, as you’ll need to supplement it with additional details about where and when to apply. For example, are you a veterinarian? If so, you probably already know that Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are likely the only ones to need you. Other specialists like air traffic controllers, correctional services, and police operations support tend to have only one or two possible Departments. This book can help with general approaches, but Departments that hire specialists often also have detailed sub-tests that are too unique to cover.

This still leaves the three main areas that represent about 90% of the public service.

First up is policy development and program design. These generally are policy wonks, most often with a background in economics, sociology or statistics. Officially, they are part of the EC (economics or social science) or SI (statistics) streams, but that is a narrow definition (there are other categories that are very similar, see more below). Their work is often around the “big picture” and figuring out how best for the government to respond to a large problem. Policy research, statistical trend analysis, and identification of key drivers in the economic or social spheres of Canada are the starting point for “policy development”, but quickly leads to consideration of possible instruments that the government has at its disposal to respond – legislation, regulation, direct delivery of a program or service, third-party contracting for service delivery, tax benefits, public awareness, direct benefits to individuals, etc. Parliament and Ministers set broad policy direction, but it is the ECs and SIs who figure out how to achieve the policy objectives and develop detailed policy options for Cabinet to consider. This category of work has one over-riding element in common – they spend most of their time reading and writing. Sure, they have meetings and consultations, and the SIs also do a lot of number crunching, but what this group ultimately does is read stuff and then write about it.

The second category is program management. Primarily this falls to one main job classification – “Program Management” aka PMs. Many people confuse “public program management” (the job classification) with “project management” (a type of work that the private sector likes to use). However, they are very different. Program managers in the public sector take what has been designed by policy wonks and approved by politicians, and translate it into a program helping Canadians. Note that much of this work looks more like “project administration” than what the private-sector calls “project management”, but even PMs in the government will inaccurately say they have numerous projects that they “manage”.

Actually they rarely manage them at all – instead they manage the funding of the projects, not the actual projects themselves. In the private sector, admin people will deal with a lot of the items above, while the PM focuses on actually managing the project – keeping sure timelines are met, maintaining GANTT charts and project trackers, addressing resource needs at different times of the project, etc. But in the government, a PM manages the funding of companies and NGOs who will in turn actually manage and deliver the projects.

This is often VERY clear in areas like international development. While the former CIDA might have had 3500 or so projects at any one time, CIDA didn’t “manage” the projects. It manages the financing of the project with reports and disbursements, while the private sector and NGOs would do the actual management and delivery.

It is often easier to think of these government projects as split into two areas with “project administration” done by government and the actual “service delivery” contracted out to third parties, so to speak.

However, not all programs are contracted out or simply financed. Employment insurance, pensions, passports, etc. are all services directly provided by government. Some of their work mirrors the project management above. For example, they will review your application (i.e. your “proposal”), determine eligibility, approve or reject based on set criteria, manage your file, collect data, etc. The two differences are that it is often to serve an individual rather than a company and they will provide the direct delivery themselves rather than farming it out to a third-party deliverer.

But almost all of the work of PMs have one over-arching element in common – they are dealing with external clients…people, companies, NGOs, provinces, municipalities, associations, etc. These are the “front-line” people who deal directly with Canadians.

The third category is a bit of a trick category – it is called “enabling services”. Generally, enabling service people have a special function they perform internally within government. Human resources is a good example. This group provides administration support to the rest of the government, and generally ONLY deals with government people. They rarely deal with external people, unless they’re managing competitions open to the public. Finance is another enabling service, with lots of people with accounting or auditing designations working on tracking internal finances across huge or tiny departments and reporting on where every single penny goes. Again, they usually don’t deal with the public directly.

Some of these groups are specialists and have special classification categories like PE (for “Personnel” aka Human Resources) or FI (for “Finance”). However, the vast majority of the enabling service category is made up by a single classification – “AS” aka “Administration”. They range from admin assistants to office managers, correspondence coordinators to ATIP officers. In most cases, they are managing records, supporting employees, tracking finances, or managing infrastructure like buildings / IT, etc.

Oddly enough, some of the day-to-day work can look a lot like the PM category’s “project administration” mentioned above. So if they do similar work, have the same skill sets, and sometimes even work on the same files, why are there two classifications? The short answer is what I noted above — PMs deal with external clients i.e. Canadians (the “front-line” service mentioned above) while ASs deal only with internal clients. It’s an arbitrary distinction and it is expected that through future modernization initiatives, these separate categories will merge. However, at present, they are still separate.

All of this will still seem fairly theoretical, and your eyes may be glazing over at the same time that your brain is starting to fall asleep. Let’s get to a real example.

Suppose the government has decided that there should be a new program to help a struggling widget industry. How will that happen?

First of all, the ECs and SIs will research the heck out of the widget industry. They’ll review literature, case studies, talk to industry people, check statistical trends, compare it to other countries, try and figure out exactly what the current situation is. This rarely requires starting from scratch, we’ve probably been monitoring or involved in the widget industry for some time, but we’ll pull all the facts and info together into a “diagnostique” that says “here’s the current situation”.

Second, ECs and SIs will move on to the analysis stage, coming up with risks, mitigation strategies, proposals, considerations of instruments, etc. and all of it leading to a recommendation of a specific response or set of responses to meet the current need. The political sphere will consider, and approve or reject. (As an aside, recommendations are rarely rejected. This is NOT, as some people think, because the civil servants are in control, but rather because there will have been numerous back-and-forth discussions before the final recommendation is made, thus ensuring that the final options presented and the one recommended is one that is palatable to the Minister and political sphere, with any truly “unacceptable” or “unpalatable” recommendations weeded out at the draft stage).

Third, with policy approval and program authority obtained, the PMs take over. In this instance, assume that the program is a small project program that helps fund market assessments for overseas markets for the widget industry to identify potential sales niches and thus boost revenue. Companies will apply, goverment PMs will assess the applications/proposals, some will get funded, the private sector will do the market assessments, reports will be issued, monies will be tracked, and files closed.

However, while the ECs and PMs mentioned above did the major work for the program design and subsequent delivery, they didn’t do it alone. Someone had to hire them. Someone had to order their desks, manage their budgets, provide computers and networks. Someone had to manage the buildings and pay the employees, remit their taxes. And someone had to ensure that everything that was being done was done according to fairly detailed rules about how public resources can be managed. Parliament and taxpayers want to know that managers can’t just hire someone off the street, such as a friend for instance. (Hence, the need for a rigid, formal system for HR, and hence the need for a book like this to help someone navigate it.) The group that does all that work is the administrative stream, supplemented by PEs (HR) and FIs (finance).

I see you’re not convinced. You’re thinking, “People have different jobs. I get it. So what?”. The difference, unlike the private sector, is that while people change jobs, they rarely change classification. An AS almost never switches into an EC stream. Admin officers don’t do policy analysis for government programs. Equally, ECs almost never become AS. PMs can, and do, switch to both EC and AS (more so AS than EC), but even then it is a relatively low percentage. And it is very hard to simply switch if you start in what you decide later is the wrong category.

You may be thinking, “that’s just bureaucracy”, “that’s stupid”, etc. I have two responses.

First, yep, you’re right, welcome to government.

Second, on the other hand, if you were hiring a senior policy analyst, with specific educational needs and background (economics, stats, sociology), specific experiences (say in policy analysis), and specific skills sets (writing, synthesis, analysis, working in multi-disciplinary teams), are you more likely to find that combination in a junior analyst already in the EC category or in an admin officer who has been doing records management for the last five years? Equally, if you are hiring a senior admin person to manage an office of 40 people, are you more likely to find the specific education background (administration, accounting, finance), specific experiences (HR, budgeting, project administration) and specific skills sets (initiative, team player, strong interpersonal skills) in a junior admin officer already in the AS category or in a policy wonk from the EC category who has been studying the widget industry for the last five years? Different work, different skill sets, different category.

And from the previous chapter you have a better idea which of those types of jobs appeal to YOU. So choose wisely.

However, you should be aware too that there is a negative and mostly false perception amongst a lot of people who work in government that there is an informal hierarchy of classifications. Namely, that ECs are more senior/important than PMs and PMs are more senior/important than AS. Part of that is born out of a bias around educational requirements. Many AS positions only require high school completion. PM positions frequently require high school plus perhaps some college or other types of training such as accounting. EC positions want a minimum of a Bachelor’s degree and increasingly a Masters degree. Subsequently, people sometimes mistake the need for more education for EC positions to mean they are more senior or more important. That isn’t true, but the informal bias does exist in many organizations.

It also doesn’t help that pay often reflects that bias too – the ECs tend to have higher starting salaries, and tend to be at higher levels within the classification (i.e. a working level for EC is somewhere around EC-04 or EC-05 while there are huge numbers of PM and AS positions at the -01 and -02 levels). Promotions also often come faster for EC than PM/AS as well (i.e. if you get hired as EC-02, you’ll likely jump up to EC-04 or -05 potentially in a couple of years, while if you get hired as AS-01 or -02, there may not be many opportunities to move up to -04 or -05 levels very quickly).

Life beyond the three big categories

EC, PM, and AS positions are pretty easy to map against the three headings I listed at the beginning – EC does policy and program work, PM does program delivery, and AS does enabling service. But there are 60+ classifications in the government, and some of them are pretty similar to the EC/PM/AS jobs in terms of skill sets and work. For example, I mentioned at the start of the section that mapping the EC classification to policy work is an over-simplification. That’s because auditors (AU), commerce officers (CO), communications (IS), lawyers (LA/LP), and foreign service officers (FS) also spend most of their time reading, writing and analyzing policy. It often has a slight twist on the normal policy work (auditors have financial training and/or focus on internal control measures, commerce officers are working on trade and industry issues), but all of them are doing “policy” work by another name. Equally, the PE category is just a specialized AS category. Hence, a modified list below.

Process Internal focus Implement and support	<–>   Spectrum	Policy External focus Design and lead
Executive / Management (EX)
Personnel Administration (PE)	Administrative Services (AS)	Program Management and Service Delivery (PM)	Economic and Social Sciences (EC)	Statistician (SI)
Financial Services (FI)	Information Services / Communications (IS)
Computer Services (CS)	Foreign Service (FS)
Clerical (CR)	Commercial Officer (CO)
Specialized administration-related positions	Core job functions	Specialized policy-related positions

As you can see from the diagram, there is a spectrum going from left to right where you move from process to policy, internal focus to external focus, and from implementation and support to designing and leading. I deliberately put it in this order to prevent the normal bias that it goes the other way (the order from right to left) and that “policy” is more important than program management or administration. The two outer columns are specialized positions, but are often filled with people from the adjacent column.

And in terms of job mobility, the above positions frequently can move one column right or left i.e. if you are a PM, you can become an AS or EC with a bit of work. But jumping multiple columns i.e. from an CS to an FS would be quite challenging. Not impossible, but challenging.

Figuring out which of the five columns interests you most will help you figure out which jobs to target in your search. But you also need to understand which departments are out there.

Departmental Roles

There are a LOT of different departments across the federal government, ranging on some microlists to hundreds of organizations to some more abbreviated lists of about fifty. But those are just laundry lists. I’ll try and group them a little bit here to help you understand the categories. I’ve tried to group by type of files or operations, and included my own quirky description as to their roles, but I confess in advance that I am over-simplifying considerably and I am using somewhat different groupings than a standard “policy” text would use — if you want to know what a given organization does, check out their website.

Machinery of Government	Government Infrastructure	Economic Development	International	Human Development	Security	Sectoral
Elections Canada Privy Council Office Canada Revenue Agency Finance Treasury Board Secretariat	Public Service Commission Canada School of Public Service Public Services and Procurement Canada Shared Services Canada Office of the Auditor General Statistics Canada	Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada	Global Affairs Canada (GAC) International Development Research Centre (IDRC) Immigration and Citizenship Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) * Export Development Canada (EDC) All government departments	Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) Service Canada Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (IANAC) Health Canada Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC)	Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Public Safety National Defence Canadian Border Services Agency Justice Correctional Services * Also CSIS	Agriculture and Agri-food Canada Canadian Food Inspection Agency Environment Canada Natural Resources Canada Parks Canada Fisheries Canada Canadian Heritage Transport Canada

1. Machinery of Government: There are five main organizations that deal with “machinery of government”, the bureaucratic phrase that means “how government works”:
   1. Elections Canada defines the rules for elections and the structures used to figure out who’s in charge (i.e. the politicians);
   2. These elected politicians become the Prime Minister, Cabinet, and Parliament and tell the Privy Council Office (who are civil servants) what the priorities are and they in turn tell the rest of the government;
   3. The Canada Revenue Agency collects money from Canadians and gives it to Finance to manage;
   4. Finance figures out how much each of the priorities will cost (in general terms) and manages the fiscal environment; and,
   5. the Treasury Board Secretariat sets the rules and regulations on how and when a department or agency can spend taxpayer money, and verifies that the rules are being met.
2. Government Infrastructure: There are five organizations that provide common services to the rest of government.
   1. While there are multiple organizations that have some impact on human resources administration in the federal government, the two biggest are the Public Service Commission (setting and enforcing rules for hiring, etc.) and the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS, which provides training and certifications);
   2. Public Services and Procurement Canada manages or facilitates the purchase of buildings, vehicles, offices, desks, electricity, telephones, computers, etc. in all government offices (think of it as your building superintendent in an all-inclusive furnished apartment), handles most of the procurement process when the government purchases anything bigger than a stapler, and now has a separate Agency called Shared Services Canada that handles IT infrastructure for the Government;
   3. The Office of the Auditor General is often considered by many to be part of the “machinery of government” section, but I’ve put it here because it provides audit services to the rest of government in addition to its general oversight function of all government operations; and,
   4. I’m also including Statistics Canada here because they provide an under-rated service to most of government as well as Canadians. They track everything from the number of cars stolen in Canada last year (I kid a friend who works there that they probably count the number of tires stolen and divide by 4!) to the number of employed and unemployed electricians in B.C. (they do detailed surveys, in addition to the annual census) to the trend in income growth following labour mobility (which is government speak for “how much more money did people make on average by moving to areas that actually had jobs?”).
3. Economic Development: Okay, those last two groupings might have put you to sleep. I’m not surprised – they put most people to sleep, even me, and I love public administration. So let’s get that economy going. There are very passionate people around the government and the country who tell you they are responsible for economic development, and most of them are deluded (see Finance, above). The real people who deal with the economy don’t work for the government. Most of them are in the private sector. Yep, I’m a bureaucrat, and I’ll admit it. The engine of growth is not government. But we do have some people who “speak private sector”. This includes Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (if there is an industry in Canada, they probably have a division that deals with it! And if you find a new one, tell them – they’ll create a program so you can get a loan to start a business in that area, so long as you put a Canadian flag on whatever you export!). Then there are various organizations that have traditionally dealt specifically with regional economic development across Canada. Most of these organizations have regional offices too. If you live in those areas, you’ll already have heard of them – the federal government likes to brag about their successes and various regional supports, particularly at election time, and the provincial government likes to complain about federal intrusion into the provinces’ business.
4. International: I worked on international files for the federal government for 14 years, and I am amazed how many people think the only international group in the government is Foreign Affairs. They are, of course, the largest and most well-known. But there are seven main places that you can do international work in the federal government:
   1. Global Affairs Canada is the obvious one and their focus is on three main areas – political relations with other countries (including both political analysis and diplomacy); economic relations with the world (economic analysis); and international trade (helping Canadian companies do business internationally, sometimes through analysis of business environments or negotiating trade agreements to remove barriers to trade). Lots of people have started working at the former-DFAIT thinking it was all about going to international meetings and attending cocktail parties, and left after they realized they were going to spend a lot of time at a desk in Ottawa reading reports or at a desk overseas writing the reports;
   2. Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA, now merged with Foreign Affairs, err, Global Affairs) is the development arm of the federal government, but that does not mean they “DO” development projects – it is still a government department. Which means it FUNDS development projects, it doesn’t implement them directly (i.e. when it gives money to an organization to distribute bednets, it doesn’t distribute the bednets directly – CIDA mainly administers the financial aspects of funding other organizations who do the projects). There are lots of people who have started working at CIDA thinking they were joining the largest development NGO in Canada – but it is a government department, and it operates like one;
   3. International Development Research Centre (IDRC) does both direct research as well as helps to build the research capacity of developing countries;
   4. Immigration and Citizenship looks at ways to attract newcomers to Canada that are reuniting with relatives already here, coming as refugees, or are mobile labour that want to come to Canada to work;
   5. Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) does analysis of global security threats to Canada plus processes security clearances for most of the rest of government…shhhh, everything they do is secret, except of course for the stuff they put on their own website;
   6. Export Development Corporation (EDC) is very closely linked to both Industry Canada and International Trade, and their goal is to encourage exports abroad, often through catalytic financing; and,
   7. Every other government department! Almost every department has an international relations division in it, so if you like the idea of international work, but don’t want to work for one of the above six organizations, you can find other opportunities outside of the main six…however, just like at the main six, the competition to work there is extremely strong.
5. Human Development:
   1. There are three main departments that do programming aimed at human development of Canadians. First and foremost, there is Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) including Service Canada. This is the largest department outside of defence, and has three large statutory programs that make up the bulk of its programming – Employment Insurance (EI), Canada Pension Plan (CPP), and Old Age Security. After that, it has numerous programs ranging from agreements with provinces for labour market program delivery to Canada Student Loans. Overall the Department has $110B in programming and more than 20,000 employees across the country;
   2. Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada basically does a lot of what ESDC does, i.e. human and social development, except focused on Aboriginal communities and the North;
   3. Health Canada (and the related Public Health Agency of Canada) are responsible for a variety of health programs across Canada. In addition to managing the social transfers to Provinces and Territories, Health Canada is also responsible for long-term health research, epidemiological concerns, health promotion, and approval of all drugs.
6. Security: For those interested in security, there are a wealth of choices. The most obvious of course is the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. They serve as a national police force, mirroring many functions of the FBI in the United States. However, in truly Canadian fashion, they also accept contracts from individual provinces to serve as the province’s “provincial police force” (i.e. in x, x, and x). As such, they have responsibility for high-level national crimes (terrorism, human trafficking, cyber crime) as well as many more routine provincial responsibilities (domestic calls, traffic enforcement, etc.). Public Safety combines high level readiness for safety with more specific readiness for emergencies such as natural disasters. National Defence operations are relatively straightforward and generally are exactly what you expect soldiers, sailors and pilots to be doing. On occasion, they are also called upon to assist civilians domestically for large-scale emergencies such as floods. Canadian Border Services Agency (CBSA) takes the lead for securing Canadian’s relatively open borders against illicit traffic of both humans and contraband (at times working with the Passport Office). Justice takes the lead for legislation and legal cases. Correctional Services has a strong role to play in simple containment, but they also do some policy work on rehabilitation. I already mentioned CSIS above under the international work, but most policy groupings would include it here.
7. Sectoral: Finally, there are a series of “sectoral” ministries / departments that deal with specific sectors of the economy. Each of them does pretty much exactly what you think they would do based on their name:
   1. Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency;
   2. Environment Canada, Natural Resources Canada, and Parks Canada;
   3. Fisheries Canada;
   4. Canadian Heritage (including both citizenship / civic duties as well as running Museaums); and,
   5. Transport Canada (dealing with all transportation infrastructure).

Summary

Whew. That’s a pretty dense list. What does it all mean? It means that having read the previous chapter and this one, you know that you need to:

• Know what types of work you would enjoy (by knowing yourself, previous chapter);
• Decide on the types of jobs you might be interested in (the classifications, i.e. EC, AS, PM, etc.); and,
• Identify which departments interest you.

After that, it’s on to finding out about jobs and applying for them.