Skills and Learning in Canada 

Backgrounder

Context

The shortage of skilled workers in Canada has become one of the most pressing public policy challenges in the country. While some issues are region specific, fundamental problems regarding skills and learning are common across all sectors of the Canadian economy.

However, assessing the state of skills and learning in Canada is difficult. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Canada ranks the lowest of 40 countries when it comes to gathering and analyzing information on training and learning. This is largely due to the decentralization of tracked data because of the limited co-ordination between provinces, government levels, private sector employers, professional associations, and education boards, universities and colleges.

Given the lack of national data and benchmarking on skills and learning across Canada, CGA-Canada and the Public Policy Forum held eight roundtable discussions across Canada with business leaders, educators, government officials, labour unions and industry representatives to gain a regional perspective on this issue. A summit was held in Ottawa on May 28^th, where a series of recommendations coming out of these regional dialogues were crafted. These recommendations will be captured in a national framework proposal, to be presented to public policy makers.

Stakeholders commented on six areas identified as having a profound impact on skills and learning in Canada including: the growing skills shortage and mobility, workplace and lifelong learning, aboriginal engagement, essential skills, immigrant labour market integration, career extension and succession planning.

Issues

• The shortage is regional and sector specific:
  • Ontario will need 360,000 more skilled workers by 2025.
  • Manitoba will need 6,500 more construction workers in the next eight years.
  • BC will need 20,000 more skilled workers over the next three years to support the 2010 Olympics.
  • The automotive industry is predicting a shortage of 12,240 to 20,170 workers between 2010-2014.
  • Some sectors, like medicine and nursing are reporting labour shortages across the country.
• Regional economic fragmentation is part of the problem.
  • The resource-rich West is attracting skilled workers from the rest of the country thus creating a shortage in other provinces.
• Canadian demographics - aging workers exiting the workforce and a declining birthrate – play a role as well.

Workplace and Lifelong Learning

• Two thirds of working Canadians have not taken part in any formal work related training in the past two years.
• OECD comparisons confirm that most Canadian companies under invest in adult training.
• Employer-sponsored training is uneven across provinces and employment sectors.
• The Canadian economy is built on the small and medium sized sector, and area with limited resources to spend on training.
• Barriers to work place training include high staff turnover rates, complexity of measuring return on investment, lack of government funding, lack of employer interest.

Aboriginal Engagement

• Aboriginal people are the fastest-growing population group in Canada, however this group is also among the most challenged when it comes to skills, training and integration into the domestic workforce.
• By 2017, Aboriginal peoples are expected to represent more than 1.4 million or four per cent of the Canadian population.
• Eight per cent of Aboriginal people aged 25-34 complete some form of higher education compared to twenty-eight per cent of non-Aboriginal Canadians.
• Employment rates of Aboriginal people have dropped since 1996 and continue to do so in 44 per cent of First Nations communities.

Essential Skills

• Essential skills are the foundation on which further skills and learning can be developed. They include: reading text, numeracy, writing, computer use, and oral communication.
• Forty-two per cent of all Canadians aged 16 to 65 have poor literacy.
• Four in ten high school students have insufficient reading skills; and two in ten university graduates, five in ten adults, and six in ten immigrants have insufficient literacy skills.
• An overall one per cent increase in literacy could translate into socio-economic gains that value $32 billion.
• Inadequate essential skills affect an individual’s ability to participate fully in the labour market, yield limited employment choices, and usually result in low income. It can have a negative impact on one’s standard of living and the economy as a whole.

Immigrant Labour Market Integration

• In the next ten years, immigration will account for all of Canada’s net labour growth.
• The national unemployment rate for new immigrants is more than double the rate for the Canadian-born population.
• Only fifty-six percent of recent immigrants have had their foreign credentials fully accepted.
  • As a consequence, six in ten immigrants take jobs outside their area of training.
• New immigrants, a potential pool of workers, are finding it difficult to integrate and consequently the Canadian labour market misses out on valuable talent.
• Lack of recognition of foreign training, no Canadian work experience, language issues are some barriers to their integration.

Career Extension and Succession Planning

• Nearly one in three Canadians is a boomer.
• In the mining sector, the largest age group is between 40 and 54 years old - far above the Canadian average.
• Currently the labour market is not capitalizing on Canada’s growing demographic, older workers. This population segment could help ease the pressure on Canada’s labour shortage and enable a transfer of knowledge to younger workers.

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