There’s a new economy coming, and Canada’s workforce isn’t ready

The federal response to COVID-19 has made Canada the envy of other countries and is popular among Canadians. The focused national strategy on getting through the pandemic together and funding largess have helped flatten the curve of the pandemic. It has also racked up a budget deficit of $343 billion nationally and with the potential of Canada hitting the grim trillion-dollar debt milestone.

But the situation facing Canadians is dire. According to the Organization on Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this the worst global recession in nearly a century and Canada’s outlook is worse than many countries. Our beneficence may end up gravely hurting us if we don’t have the right strategies in place to recover the economy in a competitive post-COVID world.

Automation and artificial intelligence were already causing rapid changes in the job market, putting many workers in low and mid-skill jobs at risk. Recessions accelerate the adoption of automation. According to our research, Canadian employers expect to respond to the pandemic-induced recession by increasing hiring in key high-skilled technology fields such as Cloud Computing, Data Analytics, and Cyber Security to name a few, but our workforce isn’t ready to fill the jobs.

How can we recover from the recession if we are not ensuring we have the skilled workforce for the jobs that will be in high demand? Why do we continue to lack a national strategy to address skills shortages when other countries have addressed this key issue for economic recovery?

Canada’s response to the skills gap, both prior to and since the recession, has been slow, inadequate, and siloed.

Prior to COVID-19, there was a ‘Quiet Crisis’ in the Canadian workforce — there were not enough highly skilled people to fill the in-demand positions. Now that we are in a recession, the unmet demand for talent has increased at the same time as we have a dramatic increase in unemployment and under-employment.

Anecdotally, universities are reporting increasing enrolments, which is consistent with previous economic downturns where an increasing number of adults turned to university to help recession-proof their careers and existing university students stayed in university to complete one or more credentials.

Employers, higher education, and the government need to create a bold plan — one that immediately provides support for long-term workforce agility for Canada. We are already behind Singapore, Ireland, Australia, and others in our response to the Future of Work. In Canada, post-secondary education is under provincial jurisdiction. At best, that leads to inconsistency and lack of transparency for employers and students alike. Like these leading countries, a national approach is needed. A National Skills Strategy developed in partnership between employers, higher education, and the government is long overdue.

The National Skills Strategy should include at least these three main components. First, we need a national skills taxonomy so that employers and higher education across the country are speaking the same language in preparing and upskilling our workforce. Second, we need consistency in Canadian non-degree credentials. This is driven in many countries by a ‘credential framework’ so that employers can clearly understand the value of increasingly popular shorter credentials like certificates or digital badges. Third, we need substantial investment in individual lifelong learning to fund individuals to take reskilling programs with accredited post-secondary providers.

In Canada, we are unprepared to up-skill our workforce and reposition our under-utilized employees for the increasing demand for these high-skilled jobs. As the Canadian workplace responds to the extensive disruption of COVID-19 and anticipates the future of work, we need to ensure that Canadian companies have access to enough highly skilled workers to fill these in-demand jobs.

It’s time to get past our debates about readiness to open the economy and actually prepare for the new economy that is coming. That is how we recover together.