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Category: Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades

Hard Thinking about Soft Skills

So, as I predicted a few days back, Canadian Council of Chief Executives’ CEO, John Manley, gave a speech to the Canadian Club (available here) in which he challenged the conventional wisdom about skills crises – which is presumably why it got zero press coverage.  He began by making the following points, based on a survey conducted of 100 major Canadian employers: Skills shoratges are a problem, but only 11% of employers said it was a big problem (see graph below); The shortages are

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December 4, 2013 5 Comments

Can Business Speak Up, Please?

This Thursday, the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE) CEO, John Manley, is speaking at the Canadian Club in Toronto on the subject of “Strengthening Canada’s Human Capital Advantage”.  Now, you may roll your eyes at this and think, “oh God, not another welders vs. BAs talk”.  But it’s possible that this is going to be a useful, serious event.  Although “everybody knows” that the business community believes there’s a critical skills gap, I don’t think business as yet has

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November 25, 2013 3 Comments

Kevin Lynch is Horribly Wrong

It’s disappointing that Kevin Lynch, former head of the public service in Ottawa, is the latest victim of that peculiarly Canadian disease, where one’s casual knowledge of the German apprenticeship system leads one to lose all critical faculties – as demonstrated in this awful article from the weekend Globe. The article starts by noting that, “in proficiency in numeracy and literacy among 16-24 year-olds…, Canada is lagging the results for the Nordic countries, Australia and Germany”.  Wrong.  Well, at least partly wrong.

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November 11, 2013 3 Comments

Freeing Apprenticeships from the Trades

I was looking at some apprenticeship statistics in a few OECD countries the other day, and I noticed yet another way in which Canada seems to be missing the boat. It’s not just that our ratio of on-the-job training to classroom training is especially elevated, for no apparent reason.  And it’s not just that our apprenticeships last longer than those in other countries, for no apparent reason.  It’s that our ideas about which occupations are apprenticeable are stuck in the

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April 29, 2013 1 Comment

More Data on Skills Shortages

I’ve been doing some work on skills shortages recently, and came across this adorable little document from HRSDC.  It’s their employment projections for the period 2011-2021, and its conclusion is pretty unequivocal: we do not have major skills shortages in Canada, nor are we going to have them anytime soon. This prediction is based on something called COPS – the Canadian Occupation Projection System.  COPS makes long-term employment projections on an occupation-by-occupation basis, based on the major components of supply (new

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April 22, 2013 3 Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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