Young Professionals Hub
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Young Professionals Hub
"Coming together is a beginning, staying together is progress, and working together is success."
- Henry Ford
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Welcome to the Young Professionals Communityǃ
This is a creative and open forum for young professionals, seeking to:
- Build a Young Professionals Network in their department;
- Contribute ideas on establishing a meaningful career in the public service;
- Exchange best practices for fostering professional skill sets; and
- Collaborate and facilitate dialogue between themselves and all levels of management.Please feel free to edit any aspect of this community and use the discussion pages.
Build a Young Professionals Network
The order of these steps can be switched around, and will be dependent on the culture of your department. Please feel free to elaborate and share experiences:
- Look around you! Seek those with differing opinions (a devil’s advocate can be important), but who ultimately share a vision of positive change. Meet informally to generate some momentum and excitement.
- Start building a mission statement by looking at what other departments have as their raison d'etre - you may be surprised by the diversity! Pull out the elements you like and narrow them down to the essence of why you’re doing what you’re doing. Get rid of inconsistencies early, because this mission statement will guide your YPN.
- Create an organizational structure that will help you put your mission into action. Make sure this structure remains flexible and allows for growth and turnover. When ready, consider creating a Terms of Reference, which will include information on your structure and mission statement. See examples from other departments to get started!
- Host your first event. It will likely have to be free or leveraging resources of partners, but that’s okay! Your first event should be to raise awareness of your new YPN. Make sure it’s closely aligned with your mission statement to ensure people absorb your messaging. Then, host a few more!
- Gain management support. Once your YPN is more established, approach someone in senior management who supports your vision. Ask them to help you generate support from other management by conveying your messaging. With more support, your YPN may be able to gain a small hospitality budget for events, promo items, or even a conference if you are ready for it)!
- Promote on the Web. Create a GCpedia Page for your YPN (examples in chart below). When ready, send the link to both your departmental intranet team, as well as the GCintranet Team to gain some traction.
- Hire a student. Once you are even more established and feel that extra resources are needed to grow, inquire into the possibility of hiring a co-op student. This student can assist in planning events, maintaining a web site, administrative tasks etc. Communications student and Business students have proven to be huge assets! In addition to the obvious benefit of having a full-time resource, hiring a student will also give you management experience! During slower times, you can expose your student to other groups who may be in need of assistance.
Other Considerations
- You may at some point come to the conclusion that in order to maintain the perception of "legitimacy" and avoid overlapping "jurisdiction" to embed yourself somewhat within the existing organizational structure and processes. For many of you, this may be a good idea, depending on your mission statement (see above). However, it will be important to be careful with this--maintaining a hub of innovation (if that is one of your goals) requires maintaining a degree of independence from the bureaucracy. This will be a fine line to balance.
- Once you have picked your mission statement, be sure to update it from time to time in response to a changing environment, but other than that, stick to it ruthlessly. Guard it with your lives, or you will end up becoming the go-to group for every single charity event your department wants to host and you won't end up with any time to actually carry out your mandate. If your members want opportunities to organize things of that nature, this sort of becomes a moot point, but just be prepared to face this trend when allocating resources.
