Ever heard of a GC Entrepreneur? Me neither until now!
Hello World
Did you know that many reports have shown that a large percentage of jobs in the future don’t exist yet? Even the Canadian federal public service is not immune to this, so to prepare for this uncertainty they have set up an experiment to explore the future.
For approximately the next year, 17 GC entrepreneurs (including me) have been put on assignment into these future jobs. Everything about the GC entrepreneurs is an experiment.
There were different ways we were hired. My application was to answer the following question in less than 500 words, or less than 2 minutes of video:
If you had the power to revolutionize the public service by changing one thing, what would you change? This was my answer.
The experience my deputy minister was looking for?
To be a creative problem solver.
How simple is that!
Our job is so new that we have no job description, there is no language profile, there is no payscale, and there is simply no box that we could fit into. This blows out anything we feel is standard in the staffing process in the Government of Canada. We are program officers, accountants, biologists, computer programmers, economists, engineers, geographs, policy analysts, marketing graduates, and of course — entrepreneurs!
So how does it work?
The Deputy Minister Task Force on Public Sector Innovation tasked each Deputy to hire an entrepreneur. The task force mandate letter can be found here.
We reside in our home departments, but at least 50% of our time is dedicated to supporting the task force. We currently have a number of task force projects that we have been assigned to and they range across many subjects including indigenous related projects, human resources, blockchain, and artificial intelligence. The other 50% of our time is department dependent.
Every 4–6 weeks we go to a task force meeting, and the entrepreneurs have an equal voice at the table with the Deputy Ministers. That’s pretty cool. They want us to speak up! Since we have the ear of these Deputy Ministers, we are in a unique position to bring issues and solutions to the table.
Being a future type of job, we are in a period of uncertainty. We know how to manage risk, but we have trouble managing uncertainty. Since we don’t have a job description, and we are an experiment, the future is ours to create. We have a basic frame of what we do from the mandate letter, but inside the frame we are creating the picture we see for the future.
No one told us to create the picture, we just decided to be innovative and start exploring. Very entrepreneurial of us! We even changed our name from Policy and Programs Entrepreneur to GC Entrepreneur. But it is an important task as we are the first cohort and we are laying the groundwork for the entrepreneurs who will come in to replace us in the future.
Essentially we are a start-up within the government, and as any start-up, we are going through some growing pains. First and foremost, we had to determine our purpose. We are not here to follow the status quo, we are here to break barriers and get stuff done, but we have to understand how we can make it easier for others in the future. To do this we have to be a team because it’s the collective work of a team that has more impact than any individual. We are 17, and we can’t do this alone, so we must also consider the 260 000 government employees as part of the team. There will be failures along the way, but that’s ok because success is built on failure.
There is tremendous potential with what the GC Entrepreneurs can accomplish as we look to the future. It certainly doesn’t mean these jobs will be around in 10 years from now, but it may lead to new ways of thinking and new ways we do our work. My goal is to make this program a success for future entrepreneurs, and make the public sector a workplace of choice. I am excited to be part of the team that is blazing the trail.
To document our journey, and share our successes and failures, we will be issuing a weekly blog on medium, so tune in weekly! You can also follow us on twitter @GC_Entrepreneur
Anthony Jaz, GC Entrepreneur
