The Future of Work and Learning Brief
Issue #50 | December 2024
Welcome to the first edition of the revised Future of Work and Learning Brief! (It’s also our 50th issue! 🎉🎈🎂) Each month it will address the challenges and opportunities inherent in the volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world of work. Authors will include me (Jeff Griffiths, Director of Skills, Innovation and Productivity), Senior Policy Analyst Stephany Laverty and, on occasion, special guest contributors.
We hope you enjoy this new format. Your comments and feedback are welcome – send a note to
Predicting the unpredictable: the rapidly changing world of work
One of the dangers of preparing a brief on the future is that nobody really knows what the future will be. As I began my first edition of the brief I reviewed some of the predictions I made in the past; some were accurate (ish), the rest were wrong, some spectacularly so. For perspective, I looked at recent reports and strategies from other organizations – which made me feel somewhat better. For instance, how many times do you think the term “Generative AI” was mentioned in the 2018 Canadian Chamber of Commerce report Skills for an Automated Future and in the more recent (2021) Alberta Advanced Education document Alberta 2030: Building Skills for Jobs (10 Year Strategy for Post-Secondary Education)? The answer is zero. Surprised? You shouldn’t be.
What we know for certain about the future is that it’ll be different from the present. We also know the rate of change is likely to increase, changes will be disruptive to certain players, and there will be winners and losers.
Based on the past, we can also speculate that advances in technology and increasing digitization will create new requirements for some skills and knowledge while diminishing the requirements for others – and that the “half-life” for skills will continue to decrease. Again, who was thinking about generative AI and the impact it would have only a short while ago?
The rate of change has implications for employers, workers, the learning/education/training system in general and governments – both federal but particularly provincial governments, who have the jurisdictional authority over education, training and credentialing.
None of this is particularly new – but our observations are that Canadian stakeholders haven’t been moving nearly quickly enough to keep up with peer economies around the world, and that has implications for our economic performance and standard of living that cannot be ignored.
Here are a few observations, which will be expanded on in the Brief over the coming months.
Prescriptive strategies are out
In a world where change is inevitable, rapid, disruptive and sometimes chaotic, attempting to be prescriptive in terms of the what and how to move forward is increasingly difficult. So rather than attempt to control the future with prescriptive strategies, it’s essential to move toward broader (more ambiguous) end-state goals and decentralize the actions that lead to the achievement of these goals in the hands of practitioners on the ground. For bureaucracies this is terrifying – they exist to create control and standardization. Yet in the face of change in complex adaptive systems, where the outcome of change is largely unpredictable, the current control and execution structures are wholly inadequate.
As humans we crave certainty, simple answers and binary solutions (this or that, on or off), and we have a political system built around these types of binary approaches. But since predicting the future is a crap shoot at best, high-level “strategy” needs to limit itself to providing only the goals, without prescribing the pathway to achieve them.
While that’s anathema for bureaucracies, in government, businesses and institutions, it’s the only way to unleash innovation and increase the agility of the system to respond to change.
Speed is good. Adaptability is the new superpower
The current systems we have to generate skills are not agile or nimble enough. Change is slow and ponderous. While one-off special courses can be introduced fairly quickly, these can only run a limited number of times before they have to go through an internal approvals process, which in theory can take a year or so but in reality, usually takes far longer. Changing curricula at the primary and secondary levels can take considerably longer – which stifles both innovation and the innovators.
Speed and agility need to be at the forefront of any discussion on how we generate skills for the population and the economy.
We need to take advantage of ALL the skills in the economy
We hear a lot about the skills gap: too many people in the economy or looking for work who don’t have the skills that employers seek. However, we also have a wealth of underutilized skill in the economy – what I call “latent skill” – that isn’t being used because it isn’t being recognized. In essence, we may not have a skills gap as much as we have a “recognition of skills” gap.
Creating agile and trusted mechanisms for recognizing skills regardless of where and how they are learned has both economic and social implications. Underemployment is rampant, particularly for younger workers and new Canadians – and we cannot continue to ignore this problem.
Open recognition approaches are becoming more accessible AND more trusted, but Canada lags behind international peer economies in adopting them. Unfortunately, the prevailing paradigm is that only skills attested to by a post-secondary institution have broad value in the economy, despite the fact that employers regularly express dissatisfaction with the skill level of individuals who hold those credentials.
Canadian provincial governments are beginning to address this. Some notable examples:
- B.C.: The International Credentials Recognition Act came into effect on July 1, 2024. It covers 29 professions and 18 regulatory bodies, removing Canadian work experience requirements, waiving language testing for some applicants, and mandating similar fees for international and domestic applicants.
- Alberta: The Foreign Credential Advisory Committee Act established a 13-member advisory committee to provide recommendations on improving the foreign credential assessment and recognition system.
- Saskatchewan: Amended The Employment Program Regulations in April 2023, introducing legally binding timelines for credential recognition (50 days for international credentials, 20 days for Canadian credentials) and establishing an International Credential Recognition Grant providing up to $6,000 for internationally trained healthcare workers.
- Manitoba: While specific legislation isn’t mentioned, the province has proposed amendments to speed up the foreign credential recognition process and launched the Manitoba Careers for Internationally Educated Professionals Program, offering financial assistance up to $23,000.
- Ontario: The Fair Access to Regulated Professions and Compulsory Trades Act ensures fair access and recognition of foreign credentials and is also cooperating with the Alberta government on better recognition for foreign credentials.
- Quebec: The Regulation respecting the selection of foreign nationals was amended, affecting procedures for obtaining selection certificates and requirements for foreign professionals.
The approaches vary, with B.C.’s legislation being the most comprehensive, Alberta taking a consultative approach, and Saskatchewan focusing on specific timelines and financial support. Other provinces have various programs and initiatives, but may not have recent specific legislation.
It’s too early to say if these changes will have much impact on the efficiency or effectiveness of getting new Canadians integrated into the economy, but it’s certainly a start.
Beyond recognizing the learning and skills of new Canadians the shift toward a broader understanding that workplaces aren’t simply a place where knowledge is applied, but also where increasingly knowledge is created, will be a critical step in decentralizing and disaggregating the skills generation system and breaking the current monopolistic approach to credentialing. This will lead to more open recognition approaches that leverage technological tools to give more flexible, adaptable and agile on-ramps and off ramps across the economy. This is essential, given the increasing rate of change in the skills required.
Continuous and lifelong upskilling/reskilling is essential
Current approaches to generating and recognizing skills presume that a good basic education in childhood through to early adulthood provides a foundation that will last well into a career – and for a long time, this assumption was probably accurate. But as the “half-life” of skills shrinks from decades to years or even months (remember back in late 2022/early 2023 when “prompt engineering” was going to be the next big career opportunity?) the need to emphasize continuous upskilling throughout a working life that will realistically last far beyond our current expectations of “retirement age” is becoming more and more apparent.
This means that the ways we incentivize upskilling/reskilling – what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce has referred to as “Talent Finance” – need to change. The Canada Training Credit ($250/year, $5000 lifetime) is better than nothing – but only just. Individuals need to be incentivized to take control of their growth throughout their adult lives – governments (federal AND provincial) have a role to play. This could take the form of adult RESPs, Individual Learning/Training Savings Accounts (similar to Health Savings Accounts) jointly funded by employees and employers, more generous and flexible ways to access tax-sheltered investments (RRSPs) throughout a working life to fund upskilling – or other methods to get individuals to invest in their continued economic viability.
Another area of concern is the current notion among employers that a trained workforce is a “social good” that is the responsibility of governments. Canadian employers spend far less on training, skilling and upskilling than employers in peer and competitor economies – and this is reflected at least in part in our dismal productivity statistics. Anecdotally, a lot of the training provided by employers, particularly for the “working” levels of their organizations (i.e., not management, technical specialists or executives), is focused on mandatory/compliance types of training (health and safety, etc.) rather than skills development, upskilling and reskilling. It’s time to take a hard look at the way training expenses (investments) are treated under tax regimes to incentivize continuous upskilling and reskilling.
Local matters
Decentralization and disaggregation in learning and skills development means a greater emphasis on local control and innovation to address local concerns. In the past, this has been frowned upon in the name of standardization (and central control) – but emerging technologies, open linked data, and new ways of identifying and comparing skills across widely different taxonomies makes the idea of massive local variability in learning and recognition approaches not only possible – but desirable. We need to embrace the technologies of open recognition, open learning and open credentialing to empower local agents to deal with local concerns while remaining connected to the broader economy of jobs. This was a pipedream a few years ago – but it’s within the capability of current technology and it will only get easier.
So – change is inevitable, disruptive, and often not as predictable as we’d like. The answer is to break old paradigms of centralization and control, unleash innovation, and focus on speed and adaptability across the learning and recognition system. In future briefs, we’ll delve deeper into how employers, individuals, institutions and governments can shift toward new ways of thinking and doing to embrace change and power better economic outcomes.
The Future of Work & Learning Brief is compiled by Jeff Griffiths and Stephany Laverty and Jeff Griffiths. Through this monthly brief, keep on top of developments in the workforce and how education and training are changing today to build the skills and competencies needed for the future.