Denise Amyot, Sherri Bell and Paul de Jong discuss how organizations and companies need to work collaboratively with learning and training institutions to ensure that the Canadian workforce has the skills required for jobs of the future.
Denise Amyot, Future Skills Council member and President and Chief Executive Officer of Colleges and Institutes Canada, Sherri Bell, President of Camosun College, and Paul de Jong, President of the Progressive Contractors Association of Canada, discuss how organizations and companies need to work collaboratively with learning and training institutions to ensure that the Canadian workforce has the skills required for jobs of the future.
Recommended links:
Future Skills: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/future-skills.html
Future Skills Council Report: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs/future-skills/report-learning-nation.html
Future Skills Centre: https://fsc-ccf.ca/
ESDC Programs: https://www.canada.ca/en/employment-social-development/programs.html
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Sherri Bell:
If we really want to build a learning culture in Canada, we have to implement more flexible, personalized, innovative approaches, where people have choices and options based on the labour market and the needs within the community. The ability to learn anywhere using new technologies is so important right now.
Jamie Nordstrand (host):
Hello, and welcome to our podcast series on Future Skills. I’m your host, Jamie Nordstrand. For years, technological advancements, climate change and new business models have been transforming workplaces all over the world. The pandemic has simply accelerated those changes. Employers, workers and job seekers are evolving and embracing the extraordinary opportunities that are redefining the future of Canada’s labour force. On today’s podcast, we will hear from Denise Amyot, a Future Skills Council member; Sherri Bell, President of Camosun College; and Paul de Jong, President of the Progressive Contractors Association of Canada. Together, they discuss new and innovative approaches to skills development and validation—a key part in building a learning nation.
Denise Amyot:
Hi, my name is Denise Amyot. I am a member of the Future Skills Council and President and CEO of Colleges and Institutes Canada, often referred as CICan. I have spent most of my career in education and in the federal government in fields related to skills and talent. I’ve been at the head of CICan for eight years now. So in today’s episode, I’m pleased to be speaking with Sherri Bell and Paul de Jong. We will be discussing new and innovative approaches to skills development and talk about its validation. So welcome, Sherri and Paul.
Sherri Bell:
Hello, Denise.
Paul de Jong:
Hello, Denise. It’s great to be here.
Denise Amyot:
Great to have the two of you. So please tell us a little bit about yourselves, and your role and experience in skills development.
Sherri Bell:
I’m Sherri Bell. I’m president of Camosun College in beautiful Victoria, British Columbia, on the traditional territory of Lekwungen and W̱SÁNEĆ people. I have spent my entire career in education, both in K–12 as a teacher and a leader, and in post-secondary. And my passion for skills started a long time ago; my father was a carpenter. And I’ve been very interested in ensuring that students have the right skills so that they can embrace their passion and go on with very successful careers.
Denise Amyot:
OK, great. And what about you, Paul?
Paul de Jong:
Yeah, my name is Paul de Jong. I’m the President of the Progressive Contractors Association of Canada. We’re a national employer association representing about 120 of Canada’s largest general and trade contractors all the way down to medium- and small-sized companies. And our objective is to advocate for labour laws, and apprenticeship regulations and procurement laws, which provide for fairness and the growth of the industry and competition.
I’ve been in this industry for 30 years now. I began my career, I guess, before I began my career, I was in university—a tradesperson. I worked doing concrete forming, and landscape construction and home renovations. And I’ve always been very pleased that I picked up those skills, even though I moved on to other professional parts of my occupation. In later years, I worked for a union, which brought me into an obvious interaction with the workforce in advocating on their behalf for conditions that not only provided for safety, but for the ability for them to advance in their, in their skills.
And more recently, for the last 10 years, working for the employer association. One of the top priorities that my board of directors and my members have placed in front of me is to increase the—not just the size, but perhaps even more importantly, the capability and productivity of the workforce. That they have, that it is, it is growing, but it is also growing in skill and capability to meet the needs and the changing needs of the marketplace.
Denise Amyot:
Wow, two great backgrounds. So, Sherri, the Future Skills report prioritizes the importance of new and innovative approaches to skills development. Why do you think this is a priority from where you are as the President of Camosun College?
Sherri Bell:
Thanks, Denise. I mean, you mentioned it, that there’s a changing labour market and the skills that are necessary are changing very rapidly. And learning is lifelong. It’s no longer that we learn skills in our twenties and they’re locked in for the rest of our lives. If we really want to build a learning culture in Canada, we have to implement more flexible, personalized, innovative approaches where people have choices and options based on the labour market and the needs within the community.
The ability to learn anywhere using new technologies is so important right now. And I know as we continue our conversation, we’re going to be able to give you examples of some of the things that both Paul and I are doing. But it’s, it is the right time. When you look at jobs today, people change jobs a lot more than they certainly did when we were younger. And going to university and sticking to one career has also changed. I see a lot of students at Camosun that go to university, get a degree and then come back to post-secondary, to a college, to be trained for a specific job. So things have changed and we have to adapt and be flexible with them.
Denise Amyot:
Absolutely, and I like what you’ve said, Sherri, when you talk about choices and options. So Paul, when we talk about skills development, what would you say is the role of employers?
Paul de Jong:
I think in some ways the obvious thought pattern, when someone says the word skill development, you begin to think of the worker. And that’s not inappropriate because it is the worker, after all, who is going to pursue those skills over time. But what’s critical is the role of the employer, because it’s the employer who has that real-world application. In my world—it’s in the construction industry, building buildings, bridges, structures—where they are the ones who identify the skills that are in demand. And so if that identification of key skills is not made by the employer and connected to the various stakeholders—whether they’re emerging workers or training institutions, government—if that identification of key skills that are in demand are not linked to that broader ecosystem, then you have these mismatches happen.
And so the employers are the one, I think, to define which skills are in high demand. And critically, as we’ll talk about in the remainder of this podcast, how flexibility and innovation can come into the delivery of those skills in a way that not only meets the needs of the employer, but the worker who is obtaining those skills.
Denise Amyot:
Let’s move to some examples then of new and innovative approaches. So, Sherri, I’m sure that you have many examples to share.
Sherri Bell:
Oh, I do. And I think I want to start with one that doesn’t require a lot of technology. It’s an example where Camosun College and the Industry Training Authority and the Nuxalk First Nations worked together to develop an innovative on-site four-year carpentry program in Bella Coola, which is a remote community. And the result of four years was that we have 12 students that are working on their Red Seal certification. And the kind of cool thing with this is that we brought the equipment, the people, up to Bella Coola, worked in the community and the carpentry students actually built things that the community wanted. So Paul talked about the skills that industry needs. Well, this was a community need. And so they talk about applied and practical hands-on learning; the students built houses. They built a community centre as part of their program, on their own land. So I think that’s pretty innovative as far as we went to where the need was and worked with a community.
Maybe I’ll give you a couple of other innovative approaches. We’ve just launched a new sonography program—which is ultrasound. And we’ve got a virtual reality program that runs on a browser that was created by some of our interactive media developer students for their colleagues in sonography. And what it does is it gives the students the opportunity to practise with the equipment without actually being in a lab. So they can practise and practise using the equipment. And when they get on the equipment, they feel like they’ve done it. So it’s practice, but it’s also confidence building.
And maybe I’ll just give one other example. It was creating a virtual reality. So students could put the glasses on and be in the operating room at the Victoria hospitals. So they were in the room, seeing the setup, seeing what was there, and it built confidence so that when the nursing students actually walked into that room, they’d been there before. So there’s lots of really great examples of how we use technology as a tool for practice, for confidence and for, you know, just building those skills the students need.
Denise Amyot:
What I like is that all you have described, how traditional training, in fact, has shifted by using new technologies. So I ask you, Paul, how can we use new technologies to create new ways for workers to learn?
Paul de Jong:
Yeah, I think there’s clearly—in some ways it’s an explosion, you know, it’s been going on for some time—but the incredible rise of technologies like simulated, you know, work stations, augmented reality, virtual reality fit very well, not just with some of the needs that the workplace had, but also with the aptitude of the new worker, if you will. The younger worker who’s familiar with computers, all of his or her life, or even video games, can adapt very well to simulating machines.
And so one of the themes you’ll hear me refer to frequently is the partnership that we have with our labour partner, which is CLAC. And the reason that we think that’s important is that CLAC has a very obvious—as unions have had for many decades—an emphasis on the training of their members. And we work closely together with them to identify areas that can improve the outcomes. And I’ll give one case: the training centre that our union partner has in B.C. has a classroom with simulators for operating equipment. And so they can, rather than going into the, onto the worksite where there are some legitimate safety concerns and logistical concerns—and particularly in the time of COVID might actually be difficult to deploy—these individuals can book time in a classroom on a simulator to experience a very real approximation of what that machine will eventually do once they’ve accumulated enough skills.
One thing I’ll finally say is I would urge, as we explore these technological developments, to create a balance, because one of the tendencies when these things emerge into the workplace is that they become a focus of their own.They’re so innovative and so exciting and so, you know, sort of magnetic that it tends to become the object in and of itself. And we always want to stress that these technologies are not meant to live on their own, but to support the human factor, you know. The workers themselves are the ones in our industry and construction who build things, and they do that, critically, with the benefit of technology. So I always urge that we hold those two considerations—the human and the technology—in a careful balance in our hands.
Sherri Bell:
Oh, I think, Paul, you’re bang on. It’s that balance. The technology that we’re using can give people such wonderful opportunities for practice and experience. But it is definitely a balance. And it made me think, we have a nautical simulator that really does make you feel like you’re on a boat. But you do want someone that has had practice on a boat. It’s not just the simulation.
Denise Amyot:
So let’s talk about workplace learning then. So, Paul, what would you say are the different personalized, maybe, flexible and online training options that allow workers to learn at their own pace and, at the same time, allow employers to balance learning needs with operational needs?
Paul de Jong:
Think about, for example, one of the challenges that construction has faced for many years, where an apprentice will have this critical balance of in-class learning and on-the-tools learning. And that’s an obvious pairing that needs to happen. But the way that that was scheduled in the past was so disruptive, both for the individual and the employer. The apprentice would have to leave the workplace for a number of months and go to school, thereby potentially having some interruption of income. And then, conversely, having to go to the job site and maybe that job site’s remote.And so they’d have to pay for two, you know, residences or that sort of thing. And so that kind of detached, if you will, approach has been resolved by some of the, not just technological developments, but reimagining how training happens. If you can do an online course or at least part of the course online, you can now do this at night, in camp, on your computer or on the weekends. You can, you can do these things between your shift cycles. If you’re on a two-week shift and you have seven days off, you can take some of that stuff online during your shift turnaround. And so these things have made a tremendous difference for apprentices who are trying to stick with it.As you may know, the apprenticeship rate across Canada is challenging in the first couple of years. There’s a lot of drop-offs. There’s a lot of reasons why those drop-offs occur. But one of them is because of that dislocation between work time and school time. And if you can lessen that challenge for the pupil and for the employer, it creates better outcomes.
Denise Amyot:
So if I asked you, Paul, how does short-term training benefit workers and employers? And why should we promote micro-credentials?
Paul de Jong:
Yeah, this is really kind of the heartbeat for me, because one of the things that we’ve observed as an employer association with our members and with our union partner is an unfortunate by-product of a worthy thing, which has to do with credentialing. The construction industry and other related industries like manufacturing and health care have an appropriate desire to profile the work of those skilled workers as legitimate in our society. The idea that a boilermaker, or a nurse or a chef has as much value to our society as a lawyer or a doctor is very important. However, if you only focus on the credential, you miss a valuable opportunity, which is the fact that in—again in the construction trades—many of the skills that you learn are closely related to credentials that are adjacent. I’ll give you an example. In the boilermaker trade, there are about 25 sub–, I’m going to call them “micro-credentials,” which are very similar not just for the boilermaker trade, but for trades that are analogous, like welder, pipefitter, fabricator, millwright, ironworker. And the old system that we have says that you have to get a boilermaker’s ticket or an ironworker’s ticket or a fabricator’s ticket. The new way of learning should be that you have a sense of the cluster of micro-credentials that will form a basis for you to perform work that are relevant in a variety of areas. So that a fabricator can perform many of the duties—perhaps not all—of a boilermaker, or that an ironworker can perform many of the duties of a pipefitter. This is very important because it gives employees or workers who are developing skills a whole new lease on life, because now instead of pursuing one path, they can pursue multiple paths, which makes them more valuable to the marketplace. The employer gets more, you know, results from that worker, and it’s just better all around. It’s a much more dynamic approach than having a bit more of a silo approach.
Denise Amyot:
So, Sherri, how does those micro-credentials help employees and employers? What do you see from Camosun College? And, what needs to be done?
Sherri Bell:
Looking at micro-credentials and how it fits for our local community, we started with looking at the pandemic again and where was the huge need. And there were three institutions that collaborated together with creating a micro-credential that may not be necessary in a few years from now, but it’s necessary now. And that was the building maintenance worker. So that was looking at how people take care of buildings during a pandemic. So it was flexible, and on-the-spot and may have a shelf life. At the same time, we were hearing from our construction partners that clean energy and efficient buildings is where they’re going, it’s also where the provincial government is going. So we created Clean Energy and Efficient Buildings, two different, stackable micro-credentials. So there’s a number of micro-credentials under Clean Energy, under Efficient Buildings, that have a flexible way of delivery. And then here’s the one that I know that when we launch it in September will be really popular, and that’s electric vehicle maintenance. And again, it’s what industry is saying: that we don’t have people trained on how to work on an electric vehicle. So we’ve put together a micro-credential for people that are already Red Seal mechanics to obtain. So it’s very connected with industry and current needs. But I think that the challenge still lies in: What is the credential worth if people don’t understand? And I think that’s where our framework with CICan can help.
Denise Amyot:
So, Sherri, in our report, we’ve indicated that experiential learning on the job will, in fact, be a much more significant element of many training modules as Canada becomes a learning nation. So what would you say are the challenges and opportunities?
Sherri Bell:
Oh, I think that the challenges, of course, the challenges are different if you’re an urban centre or a rural centre. You know, I talk to colleagues in northern British Columbia and they have more challenges because there’s not the kind of industry and businesses that are available for students to get experiential learning or work-integrated learning, co-ops, internships, apprenticeships. It’s much more difficult in a rural area. But in an urban area, for us I guess the biggest challenge is to continue to have access to businesses and employers that see the value and want our students. One of the things that I notice—I sit on the Chamber of Commerce—and those employers that know us love to have our students, and they’re always wanting more. And then there are certain businesses that just think maybe it’s too much work, too much paperwork. And, you know, even though there are provincial and federal grants and opportunities to have the students’ portion of their salaries paid for, they’re still hesitant. So I think for us, that’s always the challenge, is making sure we have enough employers that want our interns, co-op and apprenticeship students.
Opportunities, oh, I think this is a great time for many opportunities. You know, from a student’s perspective, they come to us because they want those opportunities to embed what they’re learning in their work and be able to do a co-op or other work-integrated learning because they get jobs. So, you know, you go to a business and they like what you do and they hire you when you graduate. Those stories we hear all of the time. And we’ve actually launched a program where we’re having students reflect on not only their classwork, but their experience through their co-ops and also project work where they are able to articulate those specific competencies and give examples. Because when you go for a job interview, that’s what people want to know is, “All right, give me an example of where you’ve shown that you can collaborate and think creatively with a group.” And so if you don’t practise talking about those skills and understand that you’re, what you’re acquiring, you’re not able to do that. So I think it’s got to be embedded. It’s a great opportunity to embed those kinds of competencies into conversations and be part of their learning experience.
Denise Amyot:
So maybe it’s time, Paul and Sherri, to ask you the last question. What is your call to action to ensure that Canada’s workforce continues to adapt and qualify for jobs of the future?
Paul de Jong:
I’ll offer two suggestions, I think. One of them, I think is very important. And it goes back to this concept of being a learning nation, in experiential learning. The concept of mentorship is very important. You know, when you are learning a trade—and this is not just the case for skilled trades, but other occupations as well—there’s always that valuable interaction with a senior, seasoned, experienced individual who can help demystify and demythologize and sort of interpret, explain some of the nuances of the skilled profession. And I think that there’s an obvious benefit to mentorship in and of itself. But the other critical thing is that when you become mentored, you imagine that you yourself may become a mentor in turn. And I think that’s critical, because we have to get better at passing on this knowledge. There’s knowledge that can be passed on, again, technologically and through different courses, but there’s also more nuanced things that are important and part of a mentorship arrangement.
The other thing I would say may sound a little bit lofty, but I think it’s critical because other countries in the world think this way, which is to think of Canada as nation building. That the workers, the companies that they work for, and even the country itself, take pride in building its infrastructure and its health care system, its education system, in that I think that part is already there. But I’ve gone to jurisdictions where the first priority is to build the nation. And the latter priorities are to do other things. And I think that that concept of nation building is something that we should facilitate with our new learners, with employers, with educational institutions, because that matter of, kind of, pride in being peerless in the world is very, very important, and really can—when I talked earlier about the esteem of trades—can really do a boost when you imagine that you’re in an international cohort of people who are doing the same kind of thing.
Sherri Bell:
I think the idea of pride is a really great one, Paul, because we have an amazing system, a public education system, a public university and college system. And I think what we have to do, my call to action would be leadership. To lead in the movement of nation building and the movement of creating skills for the future and lifelong learning. And in order to do that, I think listening is a key part of it. We need to listen to what employers are saying. And we’re doing that, but we need to listen and react. We need to listen and take action. We need to learn, learn from one another.
Denise Amyot:
Paul and Sherri, you have been fabulous guests. Thank you both for your time today. This has been very inspiring. And thank you for sharing those innovative practices that you have shared with us. And thank you for those inspiring words that you just said with respect to the call to action, nation building, leadership, collaborating together. So thank you so much. Merci beaucoup.
Jamie Nordstrand (host):
Let’s Talk Future Skills is a production of Employment and Social Development Canada. All opinions expressed in this podcast are that of the individual and not necessarily that of their employer or ESDC. For more information on Future Skills, or to read the Council’s full report, which includes a more in-depth perspective on new and innovative approaches to skills development and validation, visit Canada.ca/future-skills. Be sure to subscribe to our podcast and click the notification tab so you know when the next one is released. Thank you for listening to Let’s Talk Future Skills.