Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Today I have questions for the Minister of Human Resources with regard to how we hire our summer students. Every year we get summer students who come up from post-secondary school, whether it’s in Alberta, BC, Yukon, even here in the Northwest Territories, Aurora College.
My first question is: How many government summer jobs are filled with post-secondary students? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Thank you, Mr. Moses. Minister of Human Resources, Mr. Beaulieu.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. As of May 28th, we had hired 249 that have signed offers, 242 of those people are either finishing first year, second year, third year or in the fourth or fifth year. Seven of the 249 students will be starting university this fall. Thank you.
When putting out these jobs for competition with the students, has the Minister been working with the other departments or even with his department and looked at doing a coordinated start date for all post-secondary students so it creates an equal opportunity for all students who come back up to the North and for northern students, as well, to have the equal opportunity of applying on these jobs?
As we know, some schools, some colleges, some universities let their students out sooner than others. Obviously, those ones who are let out sooner have a greater advantage of putting their resumes out and possibly securing jobs while others are still in studies.
Has the Minister looked at creating a coordinated start date for all post-secondary students so that everyone gets an equal opportunity for these jobs? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
The government starts accepting applications from university students, post-secondary students, any time after December 1st. We run the application phase right up until August 15th, when some of the students are not starting back immediately at the beginning of September. So, we try to coordinate it so the first group who usually finishes university for the year, end of April, we hire a few of the students, a majority of the students then, and we realize there are more students finishing at the end of May and at the end of June. We try to coordinate it so those students are given opportunities as well. Thank you.
I think the Minister mentioned earlier that there were about 19 pending applications out there, job offers. I don’t know what process they are in with these offers.
It’s June 1st already, so I know some students would have gotten out of school at the end of April or even mid-April. We’ve still got some job pending offers here. As I mentioned, we still have Grade 12 students who are still taking studies, so they aren’t going to have the equal opportunity to get some of these government jobs.
What is the Minister doing to speed up the process so some of these jobs get filled a lot faster, giving our post-secondary students more time in the job so they can save their money for when they go back to school in the fall? What is the department doing to speed up that process to ensure our post-secondary students get into the jobs a lot sooner? Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
Last year we hired 212 students at the GNWT. This year, as I indicated, we have 268 students working, plus pending. So, if you compare it to last year, we are slightly ahead of the number at this point than we were last year.
What we’re doing is we are marketing ourselves in several ways. We have the e-mail messenger that goes out. We have a website. We looked at the human resources centres. We advertise in band offices. We talk to government services officers – we have 19 government service officers – and they are also involved. We have newspaper advertisements, et cetera, as an attempt to try to bring the students in as quickly as possible. So, we are fairly happy with the pace at which the students are coming in. We anticipate that we’ll be at least around the number that we were last year, or maybe a little bit better than that.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Final, short supplementary, Mr. Moses.
Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Within our public service system there are jobs that we have that are hard to fill, and I know at that meeting with Aurora College last week we talked about how do we look at creating programs for those hard-to-fill jobs. We talked about mentorship for our post-secondary students.
What is the Minister doing to address our mentorship problems when we have jobs that are hard to fill? If we have jobs that are hard to fill and we have a student that is trying to get into that program, what is he doing to accommodate those students to practice what they’re going to school for? Should we not have somebody in a position to mentor them?
We have been reviewing our vacancies and we have what we consider hard-to-fill positions of around 60 to 65 positions in the GNWT. Although not specifically targeted to those actual jobs, we do have some internship programs the government provides to the various departments, depending on the size of the department, a certain amount of money to get interns, and we provide enough money to have 32 interns in the GNWT. We usually end up filling all of those jobs. We also have a Progressive Experience Program within the student hires. We have 80 of those positions and currently we have 69 of them filled. The Department of Health and Social Services has the relevant experience programs for students and they have 24 of those positions in the department and currently they have 15 of those positions filled.
Thank you, Mr. Beaulieu. Ms. Bisaro.
