Digital Talent Team: Transforming our future

We dream of a digital government. A continuously evolving, self-organizing leviathan of mission-driven, passionate, talented, human-centred, digital professionals. We dream of a digital talent pipeline flowing into the BC Public Service to support our current and rapidly growing digital service needs.

We have a long way to go in realizing this vision, but we have taken the first steps. In partnership with the BC Public Service Agency, we’ve created a team to focus on this dream: Digital Talent Attraction and Development. Where do we start? The team intends to tackle three problems:

1) How we hire

· How do we improve the meritorious hiring experience for applicants? Panel members? Hiring managers?

· How do we hire more, high quality, and more diverse digital talent?

· How do we create a hiring portal and help digital talent succeed in the BC Public Service?

2) How we are structured

· How do we grow, maintain, and evolve a consistent and competitive digital talent job stream?

· How do we create org structures and supportive design to enable self-organizing teams?

3) How we develop

· How do we help BC Public Servants re-skill and transition into digital roles?

· How do we create developmental pathways for digital talent disciplines?

· What conditions do we need to create for digital talent to choose to stay and build a career in the BCPS?

Just a few small things to do. We’re beginning with hiring as that is the first experience digital talent have with the BC Public Service and the start of their journey. To that end, we’ve established a cross-ministry digital talent hiring pilot with CITZ, PSA, Natural Resource Sector, and Social Sector and have:

· Established a working group to coordinate digital talent hiring using Memorandum of Understanding #40 to create cross-ministry eligibility lists.

· Improved our practices to attract digital talent through targeted marketing and advertising campaigns.

· Improved our ability to assess digital talent through Coding Challenges and digital talent specific assessments and scenarios.

· Completed eight competitions and have been successful in attracting both internal and external talent. On average each competition is netting resources to three ministries.

Our initial hiring work is allowing us to start opening that pipeline into the BCPS where applicants can have one, coordinated and streamlined hiring experience. This work is also allowing us to strengthen the digital talent brand for the BC Government. More ministries are joining the pilot and we’ll continue to improve our processes and the hiring service experience.

We’ve just started and commit to sharing more as hiring, structure and development work continues.

Until then, we remain wildly optimistic about our future,

The Digital Talent Team

Digital Talent Team