Employers Looking For Employees With ‘Human Skills’ Like Sociability And Grit
MONCTON – Around 100 people took part in two consultation sessions for research on the skills needed across Canada by Future Skills Centre at Université de Moncton on Wednesday.
The discussion around skills need is an important one, said Byron James, the executive director of Atlantic Colleges Atlantique, in his opening remarks.
“The greatest single challenge of employers in Atlantic Canada is recruiting and retaining talent.”
Compared to the rest of the country, the unemployment rate is higher for young people, those over 55 years old, and indigenous people here, and a lower percentage of women are participating in the workforce. Yet, employers are struggling to hire and keep workers. At the same time, the population is aging and declining.
“How is it with the kinds of job vacancies we have, we still can’t get our young people absorbed into the labour market the way that the rest of the country does?” he said. “That’s an issue for which solutions need to be found.”
In addition, rural areas have higher unemployment rates compared to cities in the region. While currently more than half of job vacancies in Atlantic Canada are lower-skilled requiring less than two years of experience, in the next few years, two-thirds of jobs will require some post-secondary education.
Research and collaboration hub Future Skills Centre is hoping its work will help stakeholders across Canada come up with solutions.
Launched in February, the consortium is made up of the Conference Board of Canada, Ryerson University, non-profit research organization Blueprint and the government of Canada. Funded by Employment and Social Development Canada, it’s conducting a nation-wide tour to understand what skills are needed in provinces and territories, what programs are working, what best practices can be shared, and how to best communicate research results with each region.
“Part of the mandate of the centre is to figure out what are the regional skills needs as it relates to vulnerable populations gaining access to skills training to have better labour market outcomes; mid-career workers whose jobs are being made redundant by automation or AI. How do we up-skill them in order to maintain their labour market connections,” says Matt McKean, the director of education and skills at Conference Board of Canada who is in charge of the organization’s Future Skills portfolio.
Future Skills Centre is also seeking regional perspectives on how to best invest the $36 million it received from the federal government to help scale up innovative programs. So far, $19 million has already been committed to 16 projects, including at least one in Atlantic Canada.
FutureReady NB and Business/Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) were partners at the Moncton event, which included consultations. Employers, representatives of economic development agencies and settlement agencies, union representatives, and those representing educational institutions were present.
When Huddle spoke to McKean, the afternoon sessions were ongoing. But he said the morning sessions highlighted some key themes, including helping immigrants transition into the Canadian labour market.
Other themes that came up include helping indigenous people gain access to the skills training they need, how to help employers open doors for them, and more generally, how to make workplaces more equitable, diverse and inclusive, which includes reducing unconscious bias.
“The specific skills that kept coming up…were human skills – social and emotional skills, resiliency, and grit,” McKean said, noting that it’s in line with what top employers in Canada have said. “Technical skills are easier to train…and you can test if people have acquired them. It’s much harder to do that for resiliency, or intercultural competence, or those kinds of things.”
But McKean says New Brunswick’s strength is showing through initiatives like FutureReady NB.
“It seems like New Brunswick is certainly leading the charge in experiential learning, and that connects to the social and emotional skills conversation and the absence of some kind of applied learning module to apply those skills,” he said. “Having work experience proves to be invaluable at some point during your post-secondary diploma or degree, so it seems to be an initiative they’re taking very seriously here.”
“It’s amazing to see the commitment at the provincial level,” said Val Walker, the executive director of BHER, in her opening speech.
James, Walker and the Future Skills Centre all agree that the change needs to happen at a system level via collaboration between various sectors, including education.
“Education systems at all levels need to evolve to embrace new practices, models and partnerships. They need to expand recognition of prior experience, support self-directed learning and work in collaboration with business,” he said. “New curriculum models should emphasize essential skills such as team work, critical thinking and attitudes to a life-long learning.”
In addition, government backing is needed for programs that support continued learning and up-skilling for working adults, those entering the workforce and those who are unemployed.
“The traditional relationship between employers and colleges and universities need to be reshaped if the former is to survive, let alone thrive, in a new world,” James said. “And colleges know if they don’t change, they will become redundant.”
MacKean says better labour market information needs to be available to employers and decision makers, as well as regular citizens so that they know what work options are available and the path to get there.
He says workers can be pigeonholed into certain jobs based on their educational background – someone with a history degree can only work in a museum, or those with STEM backgrounds can’t work in the art sector, for example.
Workers who need to transition to different sectors because their jobs are becoming obsolete due to technological progress or because their industry is shrinking need more than just training.
“We heard this in St. John’s, we heard this in Calgary, we heard this a little bit [in Moncton] but not as much, but people identify with their career…So it’s very easy to show up and say we need to transition you, but if you’re a multi-generational oil and gas worker…to switch out to do green tech, that’s a whole mental change,” he said. “It’s about identity. We can’t take that for granted.”
A report will be released after each tour stop.