Inside PCO, when we did our strategic HR plan, we actually identified four separate communities that are in different states of disrepair or have different needs. We identified the analysts, the executives, the administrative support group, and corporate services. There are challenges in all of them.
For example, with our analyst community, we always need to be bringing into PCO people who are not necessarily recruited from university but are people who have been in departments, so that when they come into PCO they can bring a certain level of understanding around files. These folks tend to stay for two or three years, get the experience at PCO, understand how PCO operates and how we support the cabinet committees, and then go back out to departments again. They're considered to be quite valuable. We are looking at opportunities to actually bring folks in from departments, in a coordinated way, to actually do the analyst function.
In the administrative support area—this is not unique to PCO—it is extremely difficult to keep really good administrative support at the AS-1 and AS-2 levels, for example. We are going to increase the amount of staffing we do, trying to create inventory pools of people. We're also trying to put in place a little bit more of a developmental program so that, when people come in at the AS-1 level, we'll be able to give them development so that they can go to AS-2 or AS-3. This will not only increase their capacity, ability, and contribution to the organization, but it will also help us to retain them.