Career story: How to excel in AI and data

What does a day in your shoes feel like? And what are the key skills that can make or break a career in your field?

We have asked a diverse group of Apolitical members to share their career story with us and the tips they have for junior public servants. In this article, Ashley Casovan explains why patience and perspective are two under-valued skills for public servants.

What is your role and how do you spend your time on a standard workday?

I have recently taken a leave of absence from the Government of Canada to build off of the work that I was doing as Director of Data and Digital. In that role, I was responsible for the development of strategies and policies related to the government’s use of data, open-source technology, and Artificial Intelligence (AI). In my current role, as the Executive Director of a non-profit, AI Global. I work to build easy-to-use tools to promote the responsible and ethical use and implementation of AI.

It’s always been really important to me to work with stakeholders from diverse backgrounds as my area of work has always been so broad, it’s impossible to be a subject matter expert in everything. So I spend a lot of time learning from and working in collaboration with stakeholders from industry, academia, government, and civil society.

My mission has always been to develop strategies, policy, guidance, and tools that enable others to achieve a shared and desired goal. To do so, I try to make them as easy to understand and use, taking into account as many perspectives as possible.

What is your favourite part of your job? What would you change if you could wave a magic wand?

It’s hard to choose! Since I’ve only been in this role for six months, everything is new, exciting, and challenging which is the way that I like to work. If I had to choose, I would say that my favourite part of my job is building a tool or writing a policy that is useful for people.

Sometimes I forget that once I’ve learnt something, it doesn’t mean that everyone else knows it too. So sharing relevant knowledge is something I continue to work on. However, I try to ensure all of my communication efforts are building from or connected to existing information. There is so much valuable content that already exists, I find it important not to be redundant. As such, I try to bring together existing research and information, make sense of it, and contextualize it for practitioners.

If I had a magic wand, I would give myself the ability to read and learn faster. Or maybe just have more time. I feel like especially working in a field like Artificial Intelligence, there is so much that I need to learn to understand various different impacts and unintended consequences. With a background in data management and governance, my experience and knowledge have been useful, but understanding ethics, law, and engineering is also incredibly relevant to this work. It seems like there is never enough time in a day to read everything I want to.

In your opinion, what are the most important skills someone needs to excel in your field?

Recognizing your strengths, but also being humble about your limitations. Working in the public sector can be incredibly overwhelming. It’s like having hundreds of different businesses with thousands of different service offerings trying to coordinate all as one, with an incredibly important mandate to support and protect the public.

I have learnt that it’s important to recognize what you are good at, and put yourself in a position where you can have the most impact. At the same time, recognize that you have many incredibly intelligent mission-driven people around you that you can learn from.

It’s good to regularly check-in on how you can grow, and leverage the built-in network that you have around you to do so. I’ve found that people you admire in the workplace are more than happy to have a coffee and provide mentorship and support.

I would also add having patience and perspective. Government can be frustrating, not just because of its size, but also because of its complexity, and the fact that there are a lot of bureaucratic rules that might not make sense, but they exist for a reason. That reason might be antiquated, so it’s good to push, but it’s also important to take a pause, and figure out how to do it in the most effective way.

As I write this, I’m getting flashbacks of all the times that I wasn’t patient and acted in a fairly petulant way. So I can assure you, this is not easy, but I’ve also found that when I’ve calmed down, taken some time to understand the context, I’ve been the most successful at making necessary change.

What advice would you give to young public servants who are interested in a career in your field?

Becoming multi-disciplinary and technology bi-lingual is becoming increasingly important. Understanding how different technologies work and how data is stored, managed, moved, and governed is essential to being relevant in the responsible AI, but also understanding the impact of that data on different segments of the population as well as the challenges when you train a model on data that has been collected in one region but is being modelled for another doesn’t always work.

These are just a couple of examples of where it’s important to understand tech, but also ethics, law, and governance. It’s really important to understand the full implications of the tools or systems that you are building, and this is not always a perspective that is clear with expertise in just one domain. The best thing about working in government is that it’s relatively easy to move around within the organization. This makes it easier to learn lots in a short period of time about different systems, services, and the context in which they are delivered, which can shift from program to program.

This interdisciplinary skill set will also give you a better understanding of why your colleagues in a different part of government might be making the decisions that they are making, and find ways to work more effectively with them. As government technology is being integrated into every aspect of our work, there’s a lot of opportunities to reduce redundancies and build off of each other's work instead of re-inventing. Sometimes that’s not always clear if you’re only looking at a solution with a singular view. — Ashley Casovan

(Picture credit: Unsplash)