With pleasure. I thought this question would come up. I was trying not to take the time of the committee in my presentation, which was long and detailed, but I'll capture a few highlights.
For example, “integrated planning”: we've noticed it's really important to enhance the capacity of departments to do their business planning at the same time as their HR planning, so we are going to require that departments actually do that. They're supposed to be doing it, and now we're actually going to ensure that departments are in fact doing that.
One of our responsibilities at the agency is making sure they have the tools to do this. When you have a huge department, it can be very daunting to integrate all your HR needs and your financial needs. It's quite an exercise, but it's absolutely essential, and it's the first thing we need to do.
Second, on recruitment, one of the specific things the clerk has asked is that deputy ministers and senior leaders get personally and directly involved in recruitment, to make sure they're in charge of the recruitment campaigns and that there's attention from the top.
We also need to think about senior-level recruitment and bringing in people at senior levels from outside of the public service. That's not necessarily an easy task. The public service is an established culture and it's not necessarily easy to come in at senior levels. We're working on what we need to do to facilitate this. We're also targeting specific areas in the private sector and other levels of government where we might attract some very interesting candidates at those levels.
We're also doing some recruitment pilots for specific needs we have with respect to financial officers, compensation officers. We find that we have a big need for them. We also have a need for personnel officers, and we're recruiting people at that level. There are a number of other initiatives I could talk about, but that gives you a sense of them.
With respect to development, the Prime Minister announced the “Fellows” program. It is a development program aimed at senior levels, to build bridges between the private sector and the public service. It's an exchange program, if you want, of limited duration, to give both sides a sense of what the other universe is.
Every employee in the public service will have a learning plan. That's something that will be appreciated by all. Of course if you have a learning plan you have to explain why you're not following up on the learning or why you're not being given the time to follow up on the learning. That's another very specific example of something we're doing.
I'm sorry to go on. We are doing these initiatives right now, to make sure we give life to these four priorities.