The Development of XFN — Part 1: Why a mobility program?

I started working on the development of XFN in November 2017. Of course, at the time, I did not know that XFN was the direction we were heading in. I was brought into the Policy Community Partnership Office (PCPO) to develop a Free Agent type program for the Policy Community. Essentially, work done in 2016 by a fabulous group of people called the Policy Community Project, identified a need for a mobility program for policy practitioners. However, what was unclear was the type of mobility the Community needed to help enhance the Government of Canada’s capacity for developing, delivering and evaluating policy.

Shortly after joining PCPO, I began to work with my colleagues on virtual and in-person consultations with our Community. We discovered that across levels policy practitioners were restricted in moving between policy functions across the policy life cycle, even when the classification for the role was the same as their substantive level. This was surprising to hear, as one would think that there is value in putting people in roles they have no previous experience in so they can learn, bring a fresh perspective and have a better understanding of how the many different pieces of work government does fits together (and hey, not like they were asking for a promotion, but a chance to learn/grow).

It was clear that we needed to dig deeper into this problem and did just that. Through informal chats and engagement sessions we heard that the barriers policy practitioners encountered were vast, but some of the main ones noted were:

• Education (specifically for EC boxes)
• Language
• Length of competitions
• Previous required experience for competitions
• Skill set
• Operational requirements
• Lack of support from management
• Classification
• Location
• Knowledge of opportunities
• Risk aversion

From the information gathered from the Community it was clear that policy practitioners needed a program that would allow them to not only access work in various roles across the policy life cycle, but that they needed to be supported in their learning/growth and receive a personalized experience .

To me, the needs of the Community were clear and the problem to solve was not small. How would we do it? Stay tuned to find out what happened next!