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Coming into a new environment, given the right setup, can be a smooth ramp up and a quick transition into being productive without causing a lot of friction and slowdowns for the existing team.

When I started at the Canadian Digital Service (CDS), I was expecting challenges and opportunities, but I hadn’t really thought about the new roads we’d travel to hire the best people. In this blog post, I’ll share our experiences of working with Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) to bring specialists from around the world into CDS. Specifically, how we used the new Global Skills Strategy to hire our first international team member.

Modern technologies are powerful, but the tech world is notoriously unilingual English. Many open source tools don’t provide the multilingual control we need, like the ability to swap to a version of the content in context. So how do we bridge this gap to deliver modern services to Canadians?

I co-located at CDS for sixteen weeks, three days a week, which was still enough to keep me on my toes, especially with how involved developers are in the process. I ended up learning a lot while I was there. I know this sounds like a totally generic statement but it’s genuinely true. Keeping me involved in the process allowed me to see exactly what digital design principles can do for the quality of a...

Here at the Canadian Digital Service, we’ve been lucky to have great role models to learn from, in the U.K., the U.S., Italy, Australia, Ontario, and many other places, as we work with our partners to improve digital services for Canadians. We use a well-established play to help drive this mission: bringing together multidisciplinary talent into teams that tackle a service challenge together. Our product teams include designers, researchers, developers and product managers, but we’ve...