Louis-Félix Masson

Introduction

Six weeks at Revenu Québec, in the General Collections Directorate. My job was to handle collection files, call debtors, negotiate payment arrangements, and build a consolidation tool for the management team. This report walks through the skills I actually used, where I picked them up in the P.W. Sims program, and one area (Marketing) that wasn't part of my job at all but turned out to matter anyway.

The diagram below maps the main skills to the courses where I first learned them. The rest of the report goes section by section.

Professional communication

Communication is probably what I leaned on the most. Every day I was calling debtors, and how I sounded on the phone mattered almost as much as what I said. People don't react the same way. Some were calm. Some were tired. Some were already frustrated before I even introduced myself. One call stuck with me. The person sounded really stressed, so I dropped the script and just let them talk for a minute or two. By the end we'd worked out a payment arrangement in maybe five minutes. If I had gone in guns blazing with the legal stuff first, I'm pretty sure that call would have gone sideways.

Where did I learn this? Business Communication and Intro English, mostly. Both pushed me to think about who's actually listening on the other end. Français des affaires mattered too. A lot of files at Revenu Québec are en français, and the formality level isn't quite the same as in English. You can't just translate your English brain over.

Analytical thinking and problem-solving

Every file pulled me into a different decision. Balance check. Payment history. Legal status. Then figuring out whether to flag something to the recovery agent. First Nations files needed extra attention because they have their own procedures layered on top of the standard ones, so there's no autopilot mode for those.

A lot of this came from accounting courses. Intro Accounting, Specialized Accounting, and Cost Accounting all trained me to read financial records slowly and notice when something doesn't add up. Business Law was way more useful than I expected. Every step in collections is wrapped in legal deadlines, and missing one can throw the whole file out. The CADM course gave me the habit of looking at data as a system, not reacting to whatever caught my eye first.

Technology and data handling

Revenu Québec runs on technology. The main system is SPIC, which logs every action on every file. On top of that there are six secondary systems with bits of information an agent might need. Early on, my manager asked me to build an Excel template that would pull everything from those six systems into a single view, replacing the workflow of six tools open at once, copying numbers across and looking up the same client three different ways. I used formulas, structured references, and the template approach I first picked up in the Excel course with Dominic and later in CADM.

The computerized accounting course and Business Application Development gave me the mindset that software is supposed to make decisions easier, not just store data. That framing helped when I was building the tool. Copying information over was the easy part. Making it readable so an agent could glance at it for ten seconds and know what to do next was the actual work.

Ethics and professionalism

Confidentiality is a big deal at Revenu Québec. Taxpayer information is sensitive, and there are real consequences if you mess up. From day one, I was reminded that every action in the system gets logged. That changes how you handle things. I became way more careful about what I shared, with who, and on which channel.

Ethics and Society gave me a framework for situations where the right move isn't obvious. The lesson that shortcuts tend to create bigger problems down the road came back a lot. Especially when I was tempted to rush a file because I was behind on my daily target.

Time management and organization

The target at Revenu Québec is about seven collection files per day. My first full day on regular files, I did four. I knew I had to close that gap, so I started keeping a short priority list in the morning and grouping similar tasks together. By week six I was at seven. Not because I was rushing. More because I stopped double-checking every step that didn't need it. Working Capital Management and Budget and Financial Analysis taught me to match resources to deadlines, which is basically the same logic scaled down to a daily workload.

General education and transferable skills

The gen ed courses helped too, in ways I didn't see coming. The literary themes course and Long Fiction built up my reading speed, which matters when you have to get through a dense file fast. Œuvres narratives and Poésie et théâtre sharpened my French writing. Most of the internal communication at Revenu Québec is en français. The fitness PE course and the badminton class might sound unrelated, but staying on top of your energy across a full week is its own skill. Especially when you're travelling for Taekwon-Do competitions between working days.

Areas outside my duties: Marketing

Marketing was part of my program but not part of my job. That makes sense. As a public tax agency, Revenu Québec isn't selling anything. They do run public information campaigns though, especially around tax season, to explain obligations and encourage compliance. The communications team handles that. And they use a lot of the same concepts you'd see in commercial marketing: audience segmentation, clear messaging, reaching people through the channels they actually use. So learning these in the Marketing course gave me a better appreciation for why my own phone calls mattered. Each call is a small version of the same problem: getting through to someone with clarity and meeting them where they are.

Conclusion

Looking back at six weeks: communication mattered more than anything else. Analysis, technology, ethics, time management. All of them got pulled in too, in different proportions depending on the day. The program covers all of this. But a course on a Friday afternoon and a real file on a Tuesday morning are different animals. P.W. Sims taught me how to think about the work. The internship was where I had to actually do it, on someone else's deadline.

Evaluation summary

Valérie Côté, my supervisor at ScoopVision, gave me a 5/5 overall. She liked my attitude, said I was organized, and noted that I suggested ways to do certain tasks faster. The one thing she flagged was punctuality. I was showing up right on time instead of a few minutes before.

Actions taken since

The punctuality comment was the one I thought about the most. At ScoopVision there was a set start time, so arriving at 9:00 sharp meant I was still taking off my coat when the day technically started. At Revenu Québec the schedule is flexible, so the exact same problem doesn't apply. But the underlying message does. What Valérie was really saying is that being on time isn't the same as being ready.

Now I try to log in a bit before I actually start working. I check my messages, look at what's pending on the files I had open the day before, and figure out my priorities. Fifteen minutes, more or less. When I start the day for real, I'm already in the right headspace instead of using the first quarter hour to get my bearings. Small thing but it does change the feel of the morning.

I also kept pushing on the part Valérie liked. She mentioned that I suggested techniques to speed things up, and I've tried to stay in that mode. The clearest example is the Excel project my manager gave me where I had to pull information from six different secondary systems into the main collection system. I could have just done the bare minimum copy-paste, but I kept asking myself if there was a cleaner way to set it up so the agents wouldn't have to second-guess what they were looking at. Same instinct as at ScoopVision, just applied to a bigger problem.

What I carried forward

The main thing I took from Stage I is that small details matter more than you'd think. Being reliable, organized, willing to ask "is there a better way" — those habits get noticed even in three weeks. I've kept them at Revenu Québec, and I can feel the difference in how the recovery agents treat me. Not like an intern passing through, more like someone they can actually hand work to.

Ce qui fonctionne bien

Les deux éléments qui m'ont le plus servi en stage sont la préparation du CV et le cours d'Excel avec Dominic. Le CV, on en parle beaucoup, mais bien le monter change pas mal de choses dans la façon dont les employeurs te reçoivent. Excel, c'est encore plus direct : à peu près tout ce que je fais à Revenu Québec passe par là, que ce soit pour consolider des données ou préparer un document pour la direction. Quand un cours se transpose aussi concrètement, ça marque.

Ce qui pourrait être amélioré

Dans certains cours, la matière d'examen est surtout dans le manuel et pas dans les PowerPoint. Le problème, c'est que retrouver un paragraphe précis dans un livre papier, c'est long. Pas moyen de faire Ctrl+F. Si la matière évaluée était centrée sur les présentations, l'étude serait pas mal plus efficace, et moins frustrante aussi.

Une suggestion pour la suite

Le programme gagnerait à intégrer un cours sur l'intelligence artificielle appliquée à la comptabilité et à la gestion. Comme le dit le proverbe, lorsque le vent du changement souffle, certains construisent des murs et d'autres des moulins à vent. L'IA change déjà la façon dont on traite les données et dont on analyse des dossiers. Former les étudiants à s'en servir intelligemment, ce serait un vrai avantage à l'arrivée sur le marché.