Cutting the federal budget may rock the world of public-sector employees in Ottawa, but some small companies that make a business out of\u00a0 training bureaucrats\u00a0 aren\u2019t too concerned about the impending cuts.<\/p>\n
The federal Conservative government has been laying the groundwork for significant departmental spending cuts in Finance Minister Jim Flaherty\u2019s coming budget.<\/p>\n
Figuring out where the axe will fall and how government programs and the staff operating them will be sliced or shorn off completely has been a job led by Treasury Board President Tony Clement.<\/p>\n
Last year\u2019s budget gave Clement a year to figure out how to permanently cut five to 10 per cent, or $4 to $8 billion, out of the $80 billion Ottawa dispenses annually on programs \u2013 covering everything from keeping aloft weather-monitoring balloons to checking the quality of imported shrimp.<\/p>\n
Some of Ottawa\u2019s spending ends up in the pockets of small companies specializing in training and upgrading the skillsets of federal civil servants.<\/p>\n
The reduction could eliminate 11,000 to 22,000 government jobs in the National Capital Region by 2014-15, a new study from the Centre for Policy Alternatives, a progressive think-tank, predicts.<\/p>\n
Mary Ann Lopoukhine has been leading business skill workshops for civil servants for more than two decades and runs up to 100 sessions a year.<\/p>\n
If there\u2019s one thing she\u2019s learned, she says, it\u2019s that spending on training can be silently erased during federal belt-tightening \u2013 something she witnessed during mid-1990s austerity budgets that culled 50,000 government jobs across the country.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not visible by the public,\u201d Lopoukhine said.<\/p>\n
\u201cTraining is always vulnerable.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said there may be work upgrading younger employees as staff shrinkages leave \u201cpeople with corporate memory walking out the door.\u201d<\/p>\n
Opportunities in layoffs<\/span><\/p>\n Performance Management Consultants brings in about half its revenue from training government staff, who pay hundreds of dollars to attend its workshops and training sessions.<\/p>\n This consulting firm run out of an office in the Glebe helps private and public sector clients master the art of business writing, management strategy or dealing with thorny workplace personalities.<\/p>\n Vice-president Don Hamilton isn\u2019t sure what the next budget will have in store for his firm\u2019s s six staffers and 25 contract instructors.<\/p>\n But he says the prospect of senior bureaucrats being offered buyouts or otherwise let go may have a silver lining for trainers reliant on government business.<\/p>\n \u201cThere are opportunities because there\u2019s a changing of the guard\u201d with young federal employees move up the ladder to fill newly opened spots.<\/p>\n \u201cIf they\u2019re going to be effective, then they need training,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Rob Parkinson, an instructor who has written a book on drafting flawless briefing notes, is less convinced of any past precedent.<\/p>\n \u201cThe business hasn\u2019t been through this process before\u201d so it\u2019s hard to guess the result, Rob Parkinson said, referring to the Clement review.<\/p>\n Training shops focused on teaching government workers to better use the digital tools at their disposal may also have to adjust.<\/p>\n John Welch helps drum up new clients for Itplanit, which gives lessons on computer software.<\/p>\n Though concerned about lost business due to a new federal agency that could centralize information-technology training under its new Shared Services agency, he sees opportunity in the employment shift.<\/p>\n \u201cStaff reductions will mean nothing to us. \u2026 the fact (is) that people who are left need to be retrained to take over the jobs of the people who are being cut out.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet skills-training and other companies working as federal service consultants \u201care going to see a hit\u201d from the spending change, said David Macdonald, economist and author of the Policy Alternatives study.<\/p>\n Firms heavily reliant on federal contract work not balanced by other outside-Ottawa government clients would especially feel the pinch, he said.<\/p>\n \u201cIf there\u2019s a contraction in the business that they get, there\u2019s no place else to turn.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the Conference Board of Canada, 9,000 cumulative Ottawa-Gatineau jobs will have been shed by 2012 under earlier public service reductions.<\/p>\n Flaherty said last month some departments could be cut by more than 10 per cent, a possibility not mentioned when the review was first announced.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Bureaucrat trainers could dodge the impact of pending federal government belt-tightening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":42,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/42"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2413"}],"version-history":[{"count":25,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2724,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2413\/revisions\/2724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cusjc.ca\/ottawainsight\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}