Last week, I mentioned that I would start doing FlashForwardFriday (FFF) where I will talk about upcoming projects. At the time, I outlined my plans for an introduction to astronomy. This week, I’m revisiting my first, only and original guide, Be the Duck: Succeeding in Canadian Federal Government Competitions.

The current version

The short version of the long history is that, way back in 2004 or so, a friend asked me to present to a bunch of new, young civil servants on how to prepare for competitions. Two weeks later, I got an email from someone asking me about my deck. Except I didn’t know them; they hadn’t been at the presentation nor on the distribution list for it. They weren’t even in the same department! Somebody had shared my deck with 2 friends, and they told 2 friends, and the next thing I knew, I was a shampoo commercial.

My friend Vivian and I called it the Completely Unofficial and Totally Unauthorized guide so that HR people wouldn’t get nervous that I was kind of, sort of, a little bit talking about HR, but not THEIR version of HR, rather about how we get ready as applicants. I subsequently put it on my website, I’ve done dozens of presentations over the years, and my guide has been downloaded about 15,000 times now from the Polywogg.ca website, not including the people who just read it online. I don’t count hits that way. There was a 2004 version, just a slide deck. Then, in 2007, I wrote some prose. And some more from 2008 to about 2014. Then, a newer version in 2017. Complete with the Be the Duck cover. I started to do an update in 2021, and I tinker with a lot of content occasionally. Sometimes, I write long answers to questions on Reddit forums or even on the site there, expanding on some of the material in the guide.

But the reality is that it is out of date. I really need to do a fully updated version. Except here’s the thing. I start, I work for several weeks or months, take a break, annnnnd, I’m done. It’s hard to get back to it because some of the sub-pieces are REALLY long, and I hate to admit it, but also REALLY boring. People keep asking me about video interviews, for example, which is a much-needed addition, or about EX competitions, or maybe language levels. Still, it’s hard to find the time to write those pieces without fixing the existing structure and flow.

Then a funny thing happened. I was focusing on my plans for other “guides”, looking to scratch some other writing itches, and I realized I could do two things to improve my cover. First and foremost, I realized on one of the other guides that I wanted to put an “edition” tab on it aka “2026 edition”, for example. Which is something that has been missing from the Duck guide too…even as I update things, I didn’t have a real good way to indicate which version it was.

Secondly, I wanted in another series for there to be a “volume” indicator on the cover too. That way, if I was doing volume 1 of a 4-5 book/guide series, it would be clear which order they were in, and that they were part of the same series, etc.

As I played with those two features, I just added them to some other HR guides I was doing the covers for, and a nice little synergy happened. At the same time I was looking at some of those other guides, and if I could write a certain sub-section as a standalone “guidelet” I guess, I thought, “Oh, right, I could write Chapter 3 of that guide and call it Volume 1C” until I get the rest of the pieces written too, when I could then consolidate into one whole “volume 1”.

And then my brain went, “You dolt!”. Why didn’t I think of that for the BtD guide? I’ve been struggling to update the whole thing as one big update, with a proper edition and volume stuff. But I never thought of doing smaller versions in stages, and potentially out of order, until I have the full set done. At which time I can consolidate everything, slap a new cover page on it with updated editions and a single Volume 1 in the corner. And then reset all the sub-pieces so that if I update something on applications, well that would be the first piece in the NEXT iteration. I confess that I don’t know how many more iterations there will be. Perhaps only one. I do plan to retire in just over two and a half years, and I’m not sure I want to be trying to update that after I’m “out” of the PS. There are way more interesting things to write about at that time when I’m no longer constrained by being employed by the government and limited in what I can say.

Planning the next update

Section 1 of the guide is a basic set of “welcome” chapters. I talk about me aka PolyWogg, my background, how I came to write a book / guide about competitions. And then I segue into talking about Being the Duck as a metaphor for helping you prepare. It’s not rocket science … if someone wants to hire a duck, and you want to get hired, then you show them that you’re the best damn duck they have ever seen. Not a swan, not an eagle, a duck. A nice yellow duck, just like in the picture. Cuz you want to get hired, and they’re hiring ducks. So, the whole premise of the book / guide / approach is to figure out how to show them that you’re the duck they’re looking for, starting with saying quack, Quack, QUACK!

I don’t like the versions that I wrote of the next parts. They’re okay, but they don’t sing to me. The goal is to help you answer three or four questions before you even get started:

• What are you interested in?
• Why do you want to work for government?
• Is government even right for you?
• If you are still interested, what types of jobs are there

In HR discussions, we frequently talk about “the best fit” aka “which of the candidates would be the best fit for the job?”. But there are much more fundamental questions for you to answer — is government the best fit for you? Are you the best fit for government? If you don’t know much about government, these sections should help you figure some stuff out. Except, as I mentioned above, some of this stuff is REALLY detailed and kind of boring to write. I’m inclined to make a new version that cuts it down to about 2-3 pages each and offers resource links to other documents out that might help you figure stuff out. In the past, I’ve called it simply “understanding yourself,” but it is more than that…it is more about “what you are getting yourself into and why”.

Section 2 is the bulk of the guide, covering all of the steps of a formal competition. It generally has 7 main “chapters”:

• Overview of the major steps — helping you understand the process and what it will involve, including steps that don’t even involve you — not a lot of change in a FORMAL process, but there are lots of informal processes that are not covered in the existing guide;
• Information about how to find out about jobs in government, where they are posted, etc…part of the challenge is that there are lots of things that I could include in this chapter that are NOT about formal competitions, even though they ARE about finding job postings, making it challenging to know what to include and where — major re-positioning is needed of past prose;
• The Application process and how to avoid getting screened out — fortunately, this is relatively stable for formal processes, but less so for other processes (like inventories);
• Written exams and what you have to do for them — relatively stable, but there are areas to clean up which have confused people (such as departmental priorities and if it’s needed);
• Interviews — this is the biggest area to edit and rewrite because people have a lot of questions about the STAR method, whether they should use them, why I don’t like it, plus I need to address the challenges with video interviews, changes in interviews as a result, what happens with recorded interviews, and a whole host of other “what if…” scenarios that became more “hey this happened” stories on Reddit and my website forum;
• References — relatively stable in my view, not a lot of innovation going on here;
• Language tests — I feel almost like there could be a WHOLE book about how to work on your French prep, but I’m not sure how to structure this at all;

Now, those areas are relatively clean. Things get a little funkier with the number of people who have questions about security clearances, how they work, how long they take, etc. They ARE part of the formal process, and I can cover them here, but like with language tests, they are also a cross-cutting issue for almost any government job. People also want to ask me about Executive (EX) processes and how they differ (enormously) from sub-EX processes. On the other hand, nobody seems to care about the various special tests that the PSC has, and in fact, the PSC has eliminated a lot of them, so there is not much to cover if I need to at all. But there are tons of questions about pools, partially-assessed pools, assets, streams, etc., that I initially thought were way too specialized to cover, but people still have questions! Oh, and those little things called informal discussions (for feedback) or informal interviews (for best fit).

Section 3 is where things start to go off the rails. I covered all the main elements of a formal competition above, but as I said, where do I cover what happens in, say, a co-op / FSWEP / student situation? Are there differences for casual and soft-hiring of terms? In my current guide, it’s kind of buried / integrated in the main text.

But the biggest question of all is about non-formal competitions including networking, deployments, assignments, and all the potential “informal” conversations that happen. Some of the same headings apply as above, but other aspects are VERY different. In previous versions, I talked about it as I went, but it really deserves a completely separate section of its own, I think.

I have asked some other questions on the main Reddit forum for Canadian Public Servants, as my guide is quite well-known there and I get good feedback. And some people want a whole section on inventories (mentioned above), deployments and Executive processes (as mentioned above). Should they be separate chapters in Section 3? I confess I’m not sure. I’ve actually WRITTEN the executive one, and well, it’s long and I don’t feel very confident about it. I’m NOT an EX, I’ve never made it through an EX competition, my methods for sub-EX do NOT work in EX processes. They are VERY different. Yet the questions persist.

Section 4 would be relatively new. I’ve considered doing a series of one-pagers that basically go through every major competency for EC, PM and AS, and outline what I think it means. I also have a question that links back to Section 2. Should I add stuff in Section 2 that would be examples of applications? Written exam prep? Interview prep? Show people a “case study” so to speak? Or is that something I do here in Section 4 and beyond where I might go through a process for an EC-02 preparing for an EC-04 process or an AS-02 preparing for an AS-03?

Yet I confess I am not entirely sure where my guidance stops being “Be the Duck” and starts being about managing your career, which is a very different focus. Even some of S3 and S4 that I already described might belong better in a whole other volume. Don’t worry, I’ve thought of those too already, but I’m focusing on the HR guide for now.

Rounding up

Sooooo, here’s my challenge. I already know what I want to write, generally, as per above. But I currently have four versions of the text:

• The downloadable slide version from 2017;
• The main text version from 2017 on the website pages;
• Some updated 2021 versions on the website pages; and,
• Some updated 2022 and 2023 texts on my computer, ready for uploading.

As I hinted at the top, ideally I would write a whole new version and then upgrade everything to the latest version at once. Except that I write stuff in stages. I could literally write a section on references, for example, today. But WHEN would readers get access to it? In 2027, when I get around to a whole new consolidation? Or do I immediately update the prose version while leaving the DLable slide version out of date. It is WAY too much work and far too confusing to push updates to all sections as soon as they are done…put simply, that could mean that there would be MULTIPLE versions of the guide throughout 2025, 2026 and 2027 as I finish sections. And I don’t want that. Plus I want to assign a single ISBN number at some point WITHOUT having to figure out version control.

My thought has been some sort of index page that shows what versions are available in what forms, and if I write a new section, I just update that section. The “master” download would remain the 2017 or 2021 version until I get the next consolidated version complete.

But the structure is generally ready for me to start writing some sections again.

And come the new fiscal year, I’m going to try and work towards a brand new consolidated version for January 1st that I can label the 2026 version.