This article is written by Lucy Ellis, Senior Speechwriter, Privy Council Office, Canada.

  • The problem: Public servants need a reliable source of information when they are thinking about their next career moves.
  • Why it matters: Empowering public servants to make the right decisions about their careers leads to a happier, more productive public service.
  • The solution: Deep dives into the Canadian Public Service Employee Survey (or similar surveys in other countries) can reveal incredibly valuable information about each department’s culture, leadership and organisation.

Every day on the Public Service Reddit, someone asks about the leadership of XX department, or how much overtime can be expected in YY agency, or whether work-life balance exists in ZZ classification.

While there is certainly value in crowd-sourcing information and hearing other people’s experiences, there is another underutilised source of information for Canadian public servants to consider: the Public Service Employee Survey (PSES). If we ignore the PSES, or only glance at the topline results distributed by internal communications or town halls, then we miss an opportunity to make informed choices.

Exploring the data

The Public Service Employee Survey is rigorously developed and administered by Statistics Canada, and it is a treasure trove of disaggregated data. The results can be viewed in tables by theme, or department, or by a wide variety of demographic characteristics. But if you really want to get into it, you should download the open data sets and then start having some fun with Excel pivot tables. While this article is specific to the Canadian context, there are similar resources across different countries, such as the UK’s Civil Service People Surveys.

I could do this all day. I have, in fact, done this all day. My point is that the world is at your fingertips.

The PSES open data contains seven subsets with data disaggregated by factors such as age, years of service, demographic characteristics, job classification, employment status, language, and organisation. I recommend looking at the ‘supporting information’ table to figure out which subset has what you’re looking for.

💬 Let the author know if you have used data or plan to use data to find your next job by leaving a comment below

Subset 1 contains the overall results for all federal organisations. For simplicity, the following examples use 2022 data, but you can also compare across the past four surveys.

Which organisation’s employees felt the most valued (Question 11)? Farm Products Council of Canada.

Subset 3 has results by gender, sexuality, race, and disability.

Where did Black employees feel like they had the most opportunities for promotion or advancement (Question 44)? Canada School of Public Service.

In which organisation did 2SLGBTQIA+ public servants most strongly agree that they receive meaningful recognition for their work (Question 8)? A tie between the Public Service Commission of Canada and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada.

Subset 4 has results by classification. This dataset is unfortunately too large for Excel and is missing 2022, so we’re going to look at averages over the 2018, 2019, and 2020 survey years.

Who likes their jobs the most (Question 16)? It is such an eclectic top three that I had to include all of them: MT-01, SR-00, and DM. Junior Meteorologists, Junior Ship Repair workers, and Deputy Ministers.

I could do this all day. I have, in fact, done this all day.

My point is that the world is at your fingertips.

Research your values, needs and career goals

In your next job, are you looking for a supportive manager? Look at which departments score well in Question 27 “I feel that my immediate supervisor supports my career goals” or Question 77 “My immediate supervisor supports my mental health and well-being”.

Are you looking to find meaning and purpose in your work? Filter the results by your job classification or your demographic characteristics, and then look at which departments or agencies have positive responses to Question 12 “I am proud of the work I do”.

See which organisations line up with your values, needs, and career goals.

It’s not a perfect system. The PSES response rate was only 53% for 2022. But we’re still talking about a resource that has input from 189,584 employees in 90 federal departments and agencies.

I’ll take that over Reddit career advice any day.

Methodology notes:

  • When I make pivot tables, I put SCORE100 in the value field because I find it the easiest to interpret and make sense of. The majority of PSES questions are on a 5-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree, with options for “don’t know” and “not applicable”. SCORE100 converts the responses into an average score out of 100. You can also look at specific answers. So, ANSWER1 will give you the percentage of people who responded “strongly agree” or who responded “yes” to a yes or no question. Additionally, you can use the results for “most positive or least negative”, “least positive or most negative”, or “neutral or middle category” as your value.

  • Some questions have yes or no responses instead of the 5-point strongly agree to strongly disagree scale. If you are using SCORE100 as the value field, filter out the 9999 and X results, or it will skew your averages.

  • Most of the open data sets are too big for Excel. You will, unfortunately download an incomplete set, which leaves some data missing. Subset 4, for example, doesn’t have 2022 data and only goes to question 57. The subset is still valuable for looking at trends, but if you want to find a specific response, you’ll need to look up the data point in the online tables.

Done reading? Make sure to share your own thoughts on using data to find a job that aligns with your values and goals by leaving a comment below ⬇️

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