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Category: Apprenticeships, Skills & Trades

A Skills Agenda is an Infrastructure Agenda

Since it is budget season, and I am increasingly depressed about the prospects for better higher education funding, I thought I should share some musings I have had recently about how to make a better case for funding. I think there is a better story available than the one the sector has been using. And it even has the advantage of being true. Ready? Here it is. As a country, we are losing the skills race because we aren’t investing

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March 11, 2024 2 Comments

Time to Overhaul Apprenticeships

There are three ways in which Canada is an outlier in apprenticeships, none of which – so far as I can tell – are based on any principles other than “well that’s the way we’ve always done them”. The first way in which our apprenticeships are different is that they cover a more restricted set of occupations than other countries.  For us, “apprenticeships” are largely synonymous with construction trades and certain manufacturing fields.  Compare, for instance, our top ten apprenticeable

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March 13, 2023 2 Comments

The Upskilling for Industry Initiative

Q.  I can’t keep track any more.  What’s this big new skills initiative that got some press a couple of weeks ago? A. The 2021 Budget contained a commitment to fund “an initiative to scale-up proven industry-led, third-party delivered approaches to upskill and redeploy workers to meet the needs of growing industries”.   Industry, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) had a competition to figure out who will deliver it, much like they had a competition to figure out how to

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March 7, 2023 No Comments

Fun With Apprenticeship Registration Data

Last week we looked at undergraduate enrolment. Today, I want to look at a slightly more complicated story; namely, changes over time in apprenticeship enrolments. Figure 1 shows a well-known story about apprenticeships.  This country had a long construction boom starting just before the turn of the century driven in large part by the super-cycle in commodities prices (mainly oil and gas) through to the first half of last decade.  Then, as we all know, oil prices fell, meaning that

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September 26, 2022 No Comments

Faculties of Agriculture

Agriculture faculties often sit oddly within the modern university.  I mean this literally in the sense that they are usually off at one end of campus or in some cases several tens of kilometres away from it.  Despite strong roots (heh) in the biological sciences, they get treated as separate entities for reasons that aren’t really evident from a scientific point of view.  The rough analogy from the physical sciences  is computer science, which, like agriculture, has a pretty high

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June 10, 2021 1 Comment

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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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