Ontario Municipal Human Resources Association

On a windy day in a growing Ontario town, a university student uses a tablet to review site plans with municipal planners. When these planners were his age, they did this with clipboards, and documents blown astray could hamper the workday. The student grips his tablet as firmly as he has since he was a toddler, then pulls up the feedback-centralizing data management tool he recently introduced to the team, and gets started.

The student is helping build a dataset, but not for class nor a grade — rather, his work will impact thousands of lives, guiding one of the many fast-growing municipalities across Ontario with data that will shape transit, infrastructure and land use, standardizing zoning workflows and speeding up development review cycles. In this government office, the small improvements he makes to the ways they use tech will long outlive his co-op placement.

This story is an amalgamation of many real stories, of the ways real students in U of T Scarborough’s Arts and Science Co-op Program have been quietly helping cities and municipalities modernize how they plan, build, and serve their communities for years. And their potential to influence change just keeps growing as technology does.

Municipal governments in Ontario are being increasingly expected to do more with less. Population growth, post-pandemic service demands, housing shortages, aging infrastructure and impacts of the climate crisis are intensifying the needs and expectations people place on their local governments. Meanwhile, budgets and staff counts largely stagnate or shrink amid a worsening cost-of-living crisis and the ever-present threat of a global recession.

Technology was supposed to help bridge that gap — with tons of high-quality, real-time data about residents, and the same depth of data on services, ecosystems, infrastructure and more, technology can help governments fine-tune their services to be maximally efficient and impactful. That’s an impactful relationship, considering studies over the last few years have found Gen Zers are shying away from public sector roles, and that government’s notorious red tape and bureaucracy is one of the main reasons why.

Yet the staggering potential of hyper-efficient, data-driven policymaking and resource distribution remains untapped across Ontario. The solution, at least for several public sector offices and departments? Students. Students to act as intermediaries between emerging technologies and government processes that could use an update.

Some co-op postings include it upfront in their descriptions: these Gen Z students are being tasked with using their lifelong tech savviness to make real municipal processes more efficient, equitable and evidence-driven. They’re making small but meaningful upgrades in how offices run, when innovations in GIS literacy, coding, data visualization and systems are fresh in their minds.

One such co-op student had a lasting impact during their placement as an employment surveyor for a large city in the GTA. The student and their teammates were tasked with surveying businesses in one of three geographic zones across the city. They noticed that while the zones looked equal from a bird’s-eye view, on the ground, many of those businesses were far harder to reach than others, making the surveyors’ workloads uneven and some of their data collection slower than expected. After raising the issue, the student helped find a more efficient and equitable solution — to divide surveys by the businesses’ type, rather than pure geography, a change that will “help streamline data collection and create a more balanced process for staff in upcoming years.

Several co-op students have spent their placements conducting employment surveys, updating business information, using advanced GIS software and other tools in everything from field verification to database management to streamlining the processes for rezoning and site plan applications. That same co-op student reported relying heavily on their in-class experiences with ArcGIS Online to update business information point-by-point across the city.

“It made the transition to the role much smoother and reduced the need for additional training,” the student says.

Students like them report returning to their studies with a deeper understanding of the public service, and the impact they can have on their communities. When they’re translating data into insights that spur real positive change for real people, in a small way, it’s a testament to the human-centric, evidence-backed ways governments can better their communities.

“I was interested in working in the public sector because it aligns with my long-term career goals. Public sector work feels meaningful to me since it directly serves the community, and that gives me a sense of purpose beyond just earning a paycheck. I was also drawn to the culture of work-life balance that the public sector is known for.

During my final week, I spoke with several permanent staff who shared that they appreciate the stability and balanced pace of the work. They mentioned that private sector experience can be valuable, but hearing their perspectives reinforced that the public sector is where I see myself in the future.”