Thank you for the question.
I've had a chance to present at OGGO before. This is just a reminder that I'm 18 months into government, so I'm prefacing some of my comments with that backdrop.
I think it's relevant in the sense that what we're experiencing inside government with IT outsourcing is a very normal practice from my background working for large Canadian organizations. We are taking advantage of outsourcing because we have a 30% vacancy rate in our digital cadre of employees. On a baseline of about 28,000 positions, we have difficulty staffing those roles. That is not just a government phenomenon; that is a Canadian phenomenon right now. There is a significant talent pool gap in Canada, so all organizations are competing for the same employee base and that becomes very competitive as you get more experienced resources.
We stood up a digital talent group within the office of the chief information officer in the spring of last year to absolutely take advantage of bringing more people into the public service.
I would share with this committee that we did a job posting for cybersecurity experts across Canada a number of weeks ago. We got 1,600 applicants. We are working through those right now.
One of the challenges we have is the length of onboarding, to be completely direct. That's something we are working on with our OCHRO colleagues. It's difficult when you're looking for talent in a very hot market to take upwards of 100 to 200 days to bring them in, as they'll get scooped up by four additional offers by the time you do that. That is on our radar screen.
The public service that is currently delivering IT would like nothing more than to have more colleagues, and we are challenged in finding them in the Canadian marketplace right now. It is difficult to bring people in from other jurisdictions because of some of the security requirements we have specifically related to those working on our technology.