Public service failing to attract those millennials

Government needs to plan for the Baby Boomers’ mass exodus, writes Tyler Dawson.

By the time the next election rolls around, Canada’s public service is going to have a major talent gap, because it’s having a hard time attracting — or isn’t bothering to hire — young people, and meanwhile all the Boomers who’ve populated the ranks for a long time will be heading for blissful retirement.

At least, that’s if you believe the head of the Public Service Alliance of Canada, Robyn Benson, who obviously has a bit of an agenda when it comes to making dire projections about the public service. But she’s got a point, and in addition to looming retirements — a problem that affects all sorts of employers and will cascade through Canadian life, affecting everything from health care to taxation — it strikes me as likely that the public service isn’t prepared to fill the gaps left behind.

Given that the average age of new permanent public service hires is 37, it sure seems that’s something’s badly amiss.

“(The government) need(s) to ensure that you’ve got succession planning,” Benson told the Citizen’s editorial board. “You need to have some overlap and folks need to work together and then the Baby Boomers can leave and leave it in good hands.”

Last year, the Public Service Inter-Union Youth Caucus released a report detailing the reasons young people aren’t joining up. A lot of it’s based on cliches, that millennials want meaningful work and the opportunity to grow and don’t want to be shackled to the same cubicle for 40 years. Probably true, though ‘twas ever thus, I suspect; it’s just that other factors — marriage, mortgage, moppets — tend to make such drudgery necessary and millennials are less encumbered than previous generations by those albatrosses.

Also, if you’re looking for work, you’ve got to get paid, but there’s that whole Phoenix debacle.

Then there are the other roadblocks the government has built in: unnecessary bilingual designations; months-long hiring processes that see anyone any good get snapped up elsewhere; and a major lack of flexibility in the workplace. If you make it through the hiring hellscape, the work isn’t usually described as thrilling.

“There should be an opportunity for people to be able to excel and to be able to be innovative in the work that they’re doing,” Benson said. Well, yeah.

It’s difficult to overstate just how troubling it is when the boss of the largest federal public service union says, bluntly, that if you come work for government, you’re not going to get the chance to excel or be innovative.

I asked Benson, flat-out, to sell me, were I a hypothetical recent graduate, on the sort of career she’s had.

“At one time, to go work at the public service … this was going to be a steady job, you were going to have a good pension and you had benefits and it was a unionized workplace,” she said. Now, she says, “there’s really not that much to sell in terms of millennials coming there, unless the government changes its tune.” Yikes.

When the Liberals came in, they promised some sort of “golden age” of the public service. That, presumably, would begin by actually offering people permanent work instead of contracts.

“I really think that they’re going to have a problem attracting talented individuals to come and work for them when they can’t pay them and they can’t offer them anything other than precarious work,” said Benson.

(The office of the Clerk of the Privy Council referred a request for comment to the Treasury Board, which didn’t respond by press time.)

The coming talent gap is troubling. That doesn’t mean the public service won’t be fine with reduced staffing, but you need good young people to fill needed roles. When all the Boomers retire en masse, the government may finally have to treat millennials with some respect.

If you make it through the hiring hellscape, the work isn’t usually described as thrilling.