External Development Wing
Commercial training for non-government audiences, delivered through CAS infrastructure.
The External Development Wing (EDW) is the commercial arm of the CAS. It repurposes CAS infrastructure — curriculum design, learning platform, instructor pool — to deliver training to private-sector, non-profit, and international audiences. Revenue from EDW courses cross-subsidises the institution's public-service mission.
The EDW is not a school in the constitutional sense. It does not train civil servants, and its courses are not part of the civil-service curriculum. It operates through the same infrastructure: the same learning platform, the same curriculum designers, the same physical facilities. But its courses are priced for the commercial market, open to any paying participant, and structured around topics where the CAS's institutional expertise has commercial value.
The model is deliberately simple: every EDW course must (a) cover a topic where the CAS has a defensible competitive advantage, (b) be priced to generate surplus after direct costs, and (c) maintain the same pedagogical rigour as a Programs course.
Commercial Courses
AI-Powered Software Development
A practitioner-grade course on building production software with AI coding tools. Eight modules covering prompt architecture, codebase navigation, test-driven AI development, refac...
Crisis Communications for Senior Leaders
Adapted from CAS PM Case 4 (Personnel Crisis) for C-suite executives. A high-intensity, case-based course covering crisis communication strategy, stakeholder management, and the le...
Business Mathematics for Government
A lightweight preparatory course covering arithmetic, algebra, basic statistics, and applied government mathematics. Designed for professionals whose strengths are verbal rather th...
Public-Private Partnership Negotiation
Adapted from CAS PM Case 3 (Northern Road) for infrastructure developers and government contractors. A case-based course covering the negotiation of public-private partnerships fro...
Process Redesign Under Volume Pressure
Adapted from CAS PM Case 5 (Permit Backlog) for operations leaders in high-throughput industries. A case-based course covering process analysis, bottleneck identification, and rede...
Records and Information Management for Regulated Industries
Adapted from CAS GST Course 2 for financial-services and healthcare compliance teams. Covers what a record is, how it is classified, filed, retained, and disposed of — with industr...
The Economic Model
The EDW exists to generate revenue. Every course is priced to recover its direct costs (instructor time, platform overhead, materials) plus a margin that flows into the institution's general fund. The general fund, in turn, supports the four internal schools — particularly the School of Languages & Cultures, whose Anishinaabe curriculum development is the institution's most expensive and least commercially viable activity.
This is not philanthropy framed as commerce. It is commerce deliberately structured to fund a public mission. The CAS does not seek EDW students who are motivated by the cross-subsidy; it seeks EDW students who want the best training available in the topic, and who are willing to pay commercial rates for it.
Commission a Custom Cohort
The courses above are available as open-enrolment offerings. Any of them can also be delivered as a dedicated cohort for a single organisation, with customised case material drawn from the commissioning organisation's own institutional context.
Organisations interested in commissioning a dedicated cohort — or proposing a new topic — should submit an application or contact the EDW Director through the contact page.