Agriculture Climate Adaptation Coordinator (Program Admin Officer 3)

Job title: Agriculture Climate Adaptation Coordinator (Program Admin Officer 3)

Company: The Government of Nova Scotia

Job description: Competition # : 30126

Department: Environment

Location: HALIFAX

Type of Employment: Term

Union Status: NSGEU – NSPG

Closing Date: ​4/28/2021​ (Applications are accepted until 11:59 PM Atlantic Time)

About Us

Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change’s role is to protect the environment, human health and farm animal welfare through regulatory excellence, conservation, partnership, and promotion. To achieve this, we strive to develop legislation, regulations and policies, process notifications, applications, and approvals for regulated activities based on sound scientific knowledge and expertise. Our goal is to educate, inspect and enforce to ensure compliance with legislation and regulations. We also proactively respond to environmental, conservation, farm animal welfare, and human health risks and work to develop programs and deliver services to enhance protection in these areas.

This position is based in our Climate Change Division’s Adaptation Section. We support provincial departments, industry stakeholders and communities to prepare for the impacts of climate change. We offer climate change adaptation strategy planning and implementation support and coordination, as well as training and reporting. While the adaptation strategies of our partners vary widely, we strive to ensure our work reflects best climate adaptation research and practice and advances larger public policy goals.

About Our Opportunity

As the Agriculture Climate Adaptation Coordinator, you will be responsible for implementing aspects of our Climate Adaptation Leadership Program with agricultural partners. This is a professional skills-development, capacity-building program, designed to get provincial departments and their external partners planning responses to climate-related risks and opportunities. Participating departments include the Nova Scotia Department of Agriculture; the Department of Communities, Culture and Heritage; Energy and Mines; Lands and Forestry and Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change.

Although you are based in Nova Scotia Environment and Climate Change and will report to the Adaptation Manager in the Climate Change Division, you will be devoted to servicing and working hand in hand with the Department of Agriculture and three separate multi-stakeholder agricultural commodity teams: the Beef Industry Team, the Christmas Tree Industry Team and the Horticulture Industry Team. As such you may spend a portion of your time working out of the offices of the Department of Agriculture to strengthen your connection with partners.

Primary Accountabilities

Within this role, you will focus on:

• Leading all three teams through their own climate change adaptation strategy development process (which includes but is not limited to conducting literature reviews and industry surveys and facilitating workshops);
• Pulling together research findings into three separate Climate Adaptation Strategies and Survey Reports (one for each commodity) by March 2022;
• Connecting teams to climate adaptation course learning at critical junctures;
• Actively engaging and listening to the needs of partners and building and maintaining strong sustainable multi-stakeholder teams;
• Designing and facilitating meetings, mapping out workplans, authoring reports and delivering presentations;
• Identifying opportunities for funding, projects and policy; and,
• Conducting evaluations, tracking progress and identifying and mitigating roadblocks.

While you will have a structured process and curriculum to draw from and consultants to assist with survey design, you must customize the process and learning materials to suit the needs and context of agricultural partners. This position also provides you with the opportunity to oversee an intern who will provide full-time assistance to you and who will be based in Perennia beginning in May 2021.

Qualifications and Experience

As the successful candidate, you will have a bachelor’s degree and at least 5 years of related work experience or an equivalent combination of training and experience. Your experience must clearly demonstrate your skills in team building, project management, group facilitation and written and verbal communication. Demonstrated knowledge of climate adaptation is required (and experience preferred) as well as demonstrated knowledge and interest in agriculture as you will focus your adaptation efforts within this field.

To excel within this role, you must be imaginative, dedicated, self-directed and organized as well as a team player with exceptional coalition building, project management, group facilitation and critical thinking skills. You can use data, theory and best practice to identify creative, practical and defensible approaches to overcoming challenges and be able to recognize and articulate appropriate approaches to policy issues. You have a proven track record of working both independently and collaboratively with a team as well as experience building, empowering and leading multi-disciplinary and multi-cultural groups. You must show that you can consider different viewpoints and can manage competing perspectives diplomatically as you will be expected to forge strong relationships of trust and collaboration between partners and meaningfully bring them together in a shared activity.

In addition to the above, the following skills are essential: excellence in listening and negotiation, verbal and written communication (including persuasive and engaging presentations and reports) and project mapping and management.

Though it is not a requirement, you are encouraged to identify any experience in grant writing, survey design and analysis, monitoring and evaluation, educational training, experiential learning and more immersive, arts-based forms of engagement. We also encourage you to identify skills not listed that you have which you think would be assets in this role.

Equivalency

Applicants relying on education and experience equivalencies must demonstrate such equivalencies in their application.

Benefits

Based on the employment status and Union agreement, the Government of Nova Scotia offers its employees a wide range of benefits such as Health, Dental, Life Insurance, Pension, General Illness (Short and Long Term), Vacation and Employee and Family Assistance Programs. Click to learn more about our various benefits offering and eligibility criteria.

Additional Information

This is a PAO 3 term position until March 31, 2022 (with the potential option of renewal, subject to funding).

This position requires some travel across the province. You must either have a driver’s license, a reliable alternative form of transportation or a strategy in place to do distance communication.

What We Offer

• Career Development where you have access to career guidance, tools, resources, and ongoing training for every stage of your career.
• Engaging workplace: our Employees feel valued, respected, connected, and tuned in, we have forward-thinking policies and strategies.
• Mentorship through iNSpire: a new formal, interdepartmental mentorship program that connects employees so they can gain knowledge and experience to support their career development.
• Countless career paths for Nova Scotians.
• Department specific flexible working schedules.

Pay Grade: PR 13

Salary Range: $2,396.86 – $2,913.59 Bi-Weekly

Employment Equity Statement:

Our goal is to be a diverse workforce that is representative, at all job levels, of the citizens we serve. The Government of Nova Scotia has an Employment Equity Policy, and we welcome applications from Indigenous People, African Nova Scotians and Other Racially Visible Persons, Persons with Disabilities and Women in occupations or positions where they are under-represented. If you are a member of one of these equity groups, you are encouraged to self-identify on your electronic application.

This is a bargaining unit position initially restricted to current civil service employees represented by the Nova Scotia Government Employees Union (NSGEU). If applying from outside a government office, employees must apply correctly via this link:

Failure to apply correctly means that your application will not be given first consideration as a bargaining unit applicant, and will only be included if external applications are pursued.

External applicants and current casual employees will only be considered if there are no qualified civil service bargaining unit candidates. PLEASE NOTE: Candidates will not be considered for an interview if applications are incomplete or are missing information.

Offer of employment is conditional upon the completion of all applicable background checks and confirmation of credentials, the results of which must be satisfactory to the employer. We thank all applicants for the interest, however, only those selected for an interview will be contacted. All questions and concerns may be directed to Competitions@novascotia.ca.

Expected salary: $2396.86 – 2913.59 per month

Location: Halifax, NS

Job date: Fri, 16 Apr 2021 05:27:13 GMT