Ontario Internship Program Accelerates Intern Matching with Custom Solution.

Background

The Ontario Internship Program (OIP) is an Ontario Government initiative designed to help recent college and university graduates get hands-on professional experience and a promising start to a career in the Ontario Public Service (OPS).

The Challenge

The Ontario Internship Program (OIP) aimed to develop a future generation of public service professionals by hiring graduates for two-year internships in a variety of business areas. The OIP had an existing web site used for promotion, however, it lacked the ability to exchange internal information between stakeholders or assist with the complex intern to job position matching process undertaken every eight months.

At the same time, the intern to position matching process remained one of the OIP's most tedious and time consuming manual tasks and had to be completed every eight months. Automating the matching process in a scalable way, allowing support for the growing amount of information collected by the OIP was a top concern. OIP faced enough business challenges; specifically, the ability to recruit graduates for important government positions without the need for tedious manual tasks or technology burdens. Recommended was a platform that would ensure flexibility of growth, expansion and integration.

The Solution

The OIP's existing site was extended with a self-administration tool, allowing non-technical users to perform site updates quickly and easily, thus improving overall productivity in an environment of constraint. The new Portal improved the OIP's internal work processes and communication with the many stake holders involved in the hiring and management of several hundred interns. Using Microsoft .NET technology, our solution offered potential interns information regarding changes in the program and the types of assignments available. The Portal also contained a brief description of the assignment areas listed. Eligible candidates were then invited to apply electronically for available positions.

The system had been designed with the business rules of the intern to position matching process built-in. During the period when positions are staffed, the OIP team had the ability to use system tools to compare the intern's goals with positions available and complete the job fulfillment.

Registered interns, registered managers, ministry coordinators and internal program support staff were allowed the exchange of information through this valuable tool. Within their newly designed Portal, the addition of specific links such as an Events Calendar, Quarterly Newsletter, Coordinator Directory and Ministry Directory improved the OIP's internal work processes and communication with the many stakeholders involved.

The net gain from the transfer of a largely paper driven environment and manual process to an electronic environment where the business process is automated meant that the team could concentrate on program enrichment and not program administration.

A critical success indicator for the solution is the reaction to the new site by the main audience - the interns. Feedback to date has been extremely positive as they find the system is easy to use and provides them with exactly what they need to know, when they need to know it. The entire work experience is a much richer experience and frustration about mismatched placement is now abated.

Through our custom solution, the OIP recognize:

• Program administrators are able to focus their time on managing the program rather than managing the web site
• Intern to position matches are not only automated but are now more accurate as the program team manages the process electronically
• Paper publication costs have dropped as have information requests directed at the program support team, as it is now handled online
• Considerable cost savings from a technical support perspective, as the Management Board Secretariat will not have to hire support staff to make adjustments to the site
• The Intranet is highly scalable, stable and easily maintained by non-technical staff