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Category: Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades

Skills Shortages (Part 2)

As I noted yesterday, much of the talk about skills shortages in Canada is data-free, and factually-challenged.  What, for instance, are we to make of claims that we have a huge shortage of people in the construction trades, when even a simple look at Labour Force Survey data tells a very different story? Unemployment by Industry, 2007-2012               Yeah, that’s right: workers in the social sciences, education, and government fields (mostly university graduates) have

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March 20, 2013 3 Comments

Skills Shortages (Part 1)

OK, apparently this week I’m going to have to talk about skills shortages, because it seems that people in Ottawa have LOST THEIR EVER-LOVING MINDS on the subject. The basics of the policy discussion are as follows: Canada currently has an unemployment rate of about 7.5%, which is deemed too high.  Despite there being roughly 6 unemployed people for every job vacancy, there are some jobs which are going unfilled because of skills shortages.  This, everyone can probably agree, is

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March 19, 2013 15 Comments

Apprenticeships: Time for Quality over Quantity

We have a problem with skilled trades and apprenticeships in Canada.  At the root of it are three things: short-term thinking, bad forecasting, and a training schedule driven by money over pedagogy. Short-termism is embedded in Canadian apprenticeships.  When the economy is booming, we take on more apprentices; when it’s in the tank, we cut back.  This is because “enrolment” is based entirely on decentralized private sector demand for young, cheap labour.   Given that finishing an apprenticeship takes four or

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March 13, 2013 No Comments

The Changing Face of Vocational Training

Canada’s community colleges are often thought of as places to learn “vocational” skills. But what counts as a “vocational” skill these days doesn’t always line up with popular perceptions. One area in which this is particularly true is with respect to the trades. My associate Lori McElroy has been doing some interesting work in this respect which I think is worth sharing. When we think of colleges and trades, we often think of a lot of programs that are not

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March 5, 2012 2 Comments

Apprenticeship Booms and Busts

Does anyone remember 2008, when the most pressing policy problem we had in post-secondary education was how to increase apprenticeship enrolments? When skilled-trade shortages were simply going to kill the economy? Seems like a long time ago, doesn’t it? Now, there is an argument – one which was made very well a few months ago by the Institute for Competitiveness and Prosperity – that the whole shortage thing was overblown; certainly, it was the only labour shortage in history that

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February 15, 2012 No 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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