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Posts Tagged ‘Working in Canada Tool’

Working in Canada: The Widget

Posted in government, social media, tactics, tagged , , on 19 November 2009 | 1 Comment »

Innovative HRSDC program Working in Canada has added another online point of presence – an embeddable widget.

Example of the Working in Canada widget in action

In addition to their social media presences, the Working in Canada team has now developed a code snippet that can be dropped on to any web page to allow access to the Working in Canada site. It’s a great way to spread awareness and distribute access points to the Working in Canada tool across the web.

It’s not fully self-serve (yet?) — if you want to add the widget to your site, you will need  to contact the program by email to request it.

The program appears to be doing some blogger outreach as well. I was contacted earlier this week by an analyst from the program alerting me to the launch of this latest feature. He pointed me to two examples of where the widget has already been deployed: www.peterboroughcareers.com and www.immigrationpeel.ca.

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Working in Canada Program Goes Social

Posted in government, social networking, tagged , , , , on 9 October 2009 | 2 Comments »

wiC_fblogoAbout a year ago, I blogged about the Working in Canada initiative as a great example of the Government of Canada doing government 2.0 — it’s a mashup that pulls together info trapped in widely spread out databases and delivers it in a way that helps prospective or new Canadians make informed decisions about where to live and work within the country.

Well since that time, the Working in Canada gang has also jumped into social media, with presences on Twitter (in the usual English and French, but also Mandarin) and Facebook.

One of the coolest things about their Facebook presence? They are interacting rather than just broadcasting. Here’s a screencap:

Example of interaction on Facebook

Example of interaction on Facebook

From what I see, the Working in Canada Facebook page is developing into a hub where people are asking questions not just about the Working in Canada tool, but wider questions about coming to Canada as well. And they are getting answers — the Working in Canada folks are pointing these people to relevant information sources, regardless of whether they specifically pertain to the Working in Canada program or not. Nice work!

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Government 2.0 Example: Working in Canada Tool

Posted in bureaucracy, collaboration, government, usability, Web 2.0, tagged , , , , , on 29 October 2008 | 1 Comment »

www.workingincanada.gc.ca/tool

(via GTEC Blog post announcing winners of this year’s GTEC awards – this one received the bronze in the service delivery category for federal tech.)

This is a neat initiative. It’s a webapp that’s aimed at helping new Canadians make informed decisions about where to live and work. Put together by HRSDC.

Users enter info on the profession they are interested in and the geographic location they want to investigate, and they receive a grab bag of useful info. Here’s a screen grab at the “choose location” step.

Screen grab of the Working in Canada Tool interface at the "choose location" step

click image to see full size

It has a nice clean interface, the workflow is very obvious. I was able to blast through it in about 30 sec to get lots of relevant info: whether or not the profession is regulated or requires certification, hourly wages for my chosen location, what the outlook for that job type is, and even links to job opportunities from www.jobbank.gc.ca

Even though this is aimed at newcomers to Canada, I could imagine it being used by anyone considering a move within Canada too. F’r instance I was able to find out that people in the marketing communications world make more or less the same in Montreal (average salary: $28.33/hr) and Ottawa ($28.70/hr), and this is slightly lower than the national average ($29.97/hr). I might have to play around more with this to figure out where I need to move to!

To make the whole thing work, the app pulls data from a wide variety of govt sources. The aforementioned job bank, but also labour market information, the NOC job classification database, the CMHC, and more. See the app’s About page for the full list.

Pretty nice example of pulling together info trapped in widely spread out databases and making it work to improve government services.

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