Hi everyone,
I have been sent this survey by a couple of different colleagues and it seems like something we should all respond to: https://www.ontario.ca/page/consultation-review-ontario-government-spending
It's asking for ideas for how to improve services related to the line-by-line audit that is currently underway.
They don't want people to be asking for more money. For what it's worth (and I'm not making any claims), I wrote the following:
"My suggestion would be to maximize the use of the Literacy and Basic Skills program. While this program has been around for over two decades, it is not well known. And employers in our area (London) are having great difficult finding enough people to fill jobs. It seems to me that we need to ensure that all those who CAN work have the skills to do so - even for entry level jobs. This means they will need customer service skills, basic literacy and numeracy skills, and digital literacy skills. Admittedly, Literacy and Basic Skills programs may suffer from a bit of a stigma - not everyone wants to admit that they struggle with lower levels of skills. This is why I think that we may need to re-think how Literacy and Basic Skills programs are delivered. I believe that in addition to being a stand-alone government program, Literacy and Basic Skills should be deliberately integrated into other higher-profile programs such as Youth Job Connection, Employment Services, the Canada-Ontario Jobs Grant and Apprenticeship. I have worked in Literacy and Basic Skills for over 25 years and I have seen the need for literacy and numeracy development in all of the aforementioned areas. Literacy and Basic Skills programs could be a huge source of support to the individuals who are involved in Youth Job Connection, Employment Services, COJG and Apprenticeship, but has never been seamlessly integrated. As a result, the outcomes of these programs are not as good as they could be and the citizens of Ontario spend their time and tax payers' dollars and don't meet the goals they need to meet to move on to a better standard of living. Literacy and Basic Skills programs could provide significant examples of how such integration could work, if asked, and would be pleased to do so."
I would suggest we all circulate this survey widely to our networks and perhaps provide some suggestions for how to respond.
Thanks,
Tamara
===================== Stephanie Hobbs
Yes, great idea.
I'd also like to share something I just received from a colleague, that might be something to think about here as well.
She wanted to share the results from some research conducted by RBC. She says it's concise and straightforward -- It's a warning call, and it's the most forthright call we've seen from the Canadian corporate sector about the ongoing changes in the labour market. (I've uploaded the document here, but below is her summary/highlights)
How Canadian youth can thrive in the age of disruption
“The next generation is entering the workforce at a time of profound economic, social and technological change. We know it. Canada’s youth know it. And we’re not doing enough about it,” writes the RBC CEO in a report on research conducted about job skills, technological change, and the preparedness of Canada’s youth.
What RBC researchers found, while at points reinforcing the oft-heralded need for soft skills in the new economy, was more profound as they took a somewhat different approach -- categorizing skills over occupations in a new way and incorporating new data.
Their key findings:
1. More than 25% of Canadian jobs will be heavily disrupted by technology in the coming decade. Fully half will go through a significant overhaul of the skills required.
2. An assessment of 20,000 skills rankings across 300 occupations and 2.4 million expected job openings shows an increasing demand for foundational skills such as critical thinking, co-ordination, social perceptiveness, active listening and complex problem solving.
3. Despite projected heavy job displacement in many sectors and occupations, the Canadian economy is expected to add 2.4 million jobs over the next four years, all of which will require this new mix of skills.
4. Canada’s education system, training programs and labour market initiatives are inadequately designed to help Canadian youth navigate this new skills economy.
5. Canadian Employers are generally not prepared, through hiring, training or retraining, to recruit and develop the skills needed to make their organizations more competitive in a digital economy.
6. Our researchers identified a new way of grouping jobs into six “clusters,” based on essential skills by occupation rather than by industry.
7. By focusing on the foundational skills required within each of these clusters, a high degree of mobility is possible between jobs.
8. Digital fluency will be essential to all new jobs. This does not mean we need a nation of coders, but a nation that is digitally literate.
9. Global competencies like cultural awareness, language, and adaptability will be in demand.
10. Virtually all job openings will place significant importance on judgment and decision making and more than two thirds will value an ability to manage people and resources.
Occupations were grouped into six broad “clusters” focusing on the skills required to do the work, allowing researchers to ”see how skills apply across a wide range of jobs, and how young people might be able to move from one profession to another by upgrading just a small number of skills.” Employment projections were used to glean which skills will be in demand in the coming years and decades, and to look at transferability potential – what can be trained for.
The use of a handful of detailed cases of how individuals have maneuvered from one occupational area to another – and another – based almost solely on identified soft skills, brings home the value of focusing on and developing those skills. The cases are some of the best articulated I’ve seen demonstrating how mobile soft skills can be, how mobile they can make one, particularly in labour markets suffering a mismatch of skills between what employers say they need and what workers bring to market. Insightful for both employers and workers.
A copy of the report The Coming Skills Revolution. Humans Wanted - How Canadian youth can thrive in the age of disruption, is attached.
“Older generations have faced their own disruptions, of course, but they did not face such a fundamental rethinking of work as Canadians in their late teens and 20s are confronting today. To help Canada’s next generation do the disrupting instead of being disrupted, we need to start with 21st-century skills – skills they can use to grasp new opportunities and surf the waves of technology and innovation that are changing the world. We need to stop telling them that work revolves only around degrees, qualifications and jobs. We need to understand how to build something different: an economy and society based on skills.” (p11)
“While shifts in the workplace will affect all of us, it is critical to understand that these younger Canadians – those under 30 – are the most at risk. The most profound disruption is likely still a decade away; they have a full career ahead of them, and need to develop the muscle memory for skills development and mobility now.” (p.12)
The service economy we know today will be hard hit: “Labour demand will be weakest for the Facilitators cluster. Facilitators include opticians, payroll clerks, customer service representatives, administrative assistants, Uber drivers, drone operators, mail workers – people who serve or support the wants and needs of others. The Canadian economy is expected to generate 570,000 job openings for Facilitators, the second-most of any cluster. But there will be more Facilitators than are needed to fill those jobs, partly due to artificial intelligence and digital processes (think chatbots and self-driving cars), which will leave half the cluster’s occupations highly susceptible to automation.” (p.17)
We may well be in the throes of our fourth industrial revolution, but the trajectory is unpredictable. “What about the modern skills we keep hearing will allow (youth) to work with software and machines – skills such as programming, science, mathematics and technology design? Our research shows lower demand for these skills in the next four years. Although they will remain critical for some industries, they are not used widely across occupations…. But we can’t ignore technical skills, not for a second. Because as technology disrupts one occupation after another, some form of these skills will become more broadly important. Few young Canadians will need the type of coding proficiency required to work in Silicon Valley, but most will need a healthy dose of digital fluency and comprehension. Soon, we’ll come to think about digital literacy like we do regular literacy: a prerequisite for nearly any job. A recent study by the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC found that 71 percent of U.S. jobs now require medium or high amounts of digital skills, up from 45 percent between 2002 and 2016. (p.20-21)
“Even as some employers lament young Canadians’ skills gaps, they remain stuck in the habits of the jobs economy – for instance, sifting through resumes for standard keywords, overlooking all but the applicants who have certain formal degrees, qualifications and job titles.” (p.24)
More change: Canada in 2030
20% of Canadians will be over the age of 65 (compared to 17% today)
60% of Canadians will be of working age (down from 66.5% today)
28% of Canadians will be foreign-born (compared to 22% today)
32% of Canadians will be visible minorities (compared to 22.3% today)
62% What the labour force participation rate will be (today it is 66%)
1.5% What the annual GDP growth rate will be per year (over the last two decades it has averaged 2.3% annually)
75% Percentage of global GDP accounted for by the service sector; it will also account for 84% of jobs (today the service sector accounts for 70% of GDP and 80% of jobs)
40% The percentage of global GDP that the emerging markets of the G20 could represent by 2030, surpassing that of the G7 (today the G7 represents half of global GDP, while the emerging markets make up just 30%)
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