Custom exec program helps Government of Ontario employees deepen understanding of provincial energy system

Professional development hasn’t stopped because of the COVID-19 pandemic – instead, it’s being outfitted for online learning. For Ontario Ministry of Energy, Northern Development and Mines (external link, opens in new window)  staff, the decision to partner with the Centre for Urban Energy (CUE) at Ryerson University helped them explore various aspects of Ontario’s electricity system.

The executive education program, developed in collaboration with Ministry personnel, was originally intended to be delivered in person at Ryerson’s Centre for Urban Innovation in spring 2020, but had to be adapted when lockdown measures went into effect.

“Online learning allowed us to continue our professional development journey despite COVID,” says Ryan Zade, senior advisor of the Ministry’s Distribution Performance and Modernization branch and former visiting research fellow at CUE. “I think it was a very innovative approach to ensuring that we continue to grow as policy advisors during a very difficult time.”

Zade’s familiarity with CUE’s expertise in the energy sector helped design a customized course that was the first for their branch.

“Given the offerings that Ryerson and CUE already have through their executive education program, we were able to build a program that really suited our needs,” explains Zade. “Not one minute was wasted for anybody during the education process.”

The intensive course ran for four weeks between Aug. 5 and Sept. 3, 2020. Fourteen staff members, divided into two cohorts, tackled five key topics alongside expert instructors from the field.

Mateen Khan, manager of the Ministry’s Distribution, Performance and Modernization branch, explains that the program was selected over other potential training opportunities. 

“Ultimately, a lot of the options that were tabled were almost administrative,” says Khan. “Tracking, staying on top of things, managing your files and folders and emails, things like that. But Ryan had introduced an option through his relationship with the folks over at Ryerson where we could have a more robust learning opportunity. And doing it in a way that not only benefited us from a knowledge perspective, but also was more meaningful in terms of the training itself.”

The remote learning model did present a few challenges, however. One was that participants were not able to benefit from hands-on sessions inside CUE’s state-of-the-art laboratories.

“Unfortunately, the online platform really limits the ability to have a more interactive feel,” says Zade. “It’s harder to do group activities or facilitate robust discussion, but credit to the instructors, they really did the best they could to make it an engaging experience.”

“It’s not an easy thing from their perspective to have to go through those materials in a seven-hour run, two days in a row,” adds Khan.

For the Ministry team, the choice to undertake the course proved to be the right one. 

“This program was very timely and relevant,” says Khan. 

“There’s always an academic aspect to these things, and then there’s the practical things, and I felt like every day we got the best of both,” says Zade. “Because as policy advisors, that’s the space in which we live – matching what’s out there with the political and socioeconomic context in which we live.”