Thank you, Chair.
I served 10 years in the Canadian Armed Forces as a combat engineer and intelligence operator. I served in Afghanistan in Operation Athena in 2009, and I was medically released in 2017. I am fortunate to have maintained my faculties through ongoing rehab and therapy.
I thank the honoured members of this committee for their time this afternoon.
During my transition, I completed vocational rehabilitation and earned a postgraduate certificate in project management. I have successfully navigated the priority hire process and will be starting in a management position with ESDC in June.
Overall, my search for public service employment has been stressful, frustrating and unnecessarily complicated. The transition from the military is stressful, especially when managing a medical diagnosis. I felt pressure to use my VRPSM, but like most transitioning soldiers, I lacked direction.
It might help if there were a clear path to a public service job early in the process, with the support of a VPSU adviser. This vision of a job could help guide members in choosing the best routes to education and accreditation.
The SISIP vocational rehabilitation program should be sufficiently lengthened to capture educational requirements of civilian employment that correlate with the member's military trade. As an example, I was a combat engineer. The civilian equivalent would be a civil engineering technologist, which is a three-year program.
The SISIP program does not account for the time it takes members to secure public service employment after completing vocational rehabilitation. In receiving a job reference or analyzing a job poster, there is very little information that tells the applicant what the job actually does. This makes it very difficult to determine whether a job fits the applicant.
A priority hire candidate only needs to respond to essential qualifications within the statement of merit criteria, but this is the most difficult part of the screening process. To be successful, a candidate must write a clear response to the essential qualification, with no detail left out. This process requires support to examine, edit and proof these responses. Wordsmithing is a skill many people struggle with.
The feedback received when unsuccessful was often vague and unconstructive. It is highly demoralizing to be rejected without feedback.
There were issues meeting the educational requirement for positions I was otherwise qualified for. Specifically, I applied for intelligence analyst positions that I had experience for, yet failed due to a stringent educational requirement.
Overall, several organizations included requirements on understanding the organizational structure and mandate of that department, which puts veterans external to the public service at a disadvantage.
Lastly, priority hire benefits can be transferred to spouses upon death or severe disability. I feel that benefits for spouses should be more liberally applied or shared, to reduce the stresses on families in transition.
In summary, the key factors would be to connect transitioning members with potential public service jobs early, with support from VPSU; response to essential qualifications must be simplified; and SISIP benefits should be expanded.
As soldiers, we take our oath to serve the interests of Canada. There should be a simple process to continue that service as a public servant. As of today, the process is anything but simple.
Thank you.