Canada needs to start giving students more credit
Government should measure and recognize technical and soft skills
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadians are retiring or are being laid off in greater numbers and taking their skills and experience out of the workforce. At the same time, many others are facing career disruptions and have had to quickly retool just to survive.
As we work toward a longterm economic recovery, policy-makers and post-secondary institutions need to ensure younger learners and mid-career professionals are acquiring the right mix of skills for the future. Often forgotten in the discussion around skills development are the critical “soft skills” that are essential to every workplace and much soughtafter by employers.
It’s time for a national skills and experience strategy that includes a framework to credit soft skills in order to better address skills gaps across the country and prepare students for jobs of the future. What are “soft skills?” Soft skills are non-technical, developed capacities that an individual must have to be effective in a job. Unlike technical skills, soft skills traditionally lack an accreditation framework due to the difficulty in quantifying them. Employment and Social Development Canada’s pan-Canadian skills taxonomy, which describes hundreds of skills and competencies, includes examples of soft skills such as social perceptiveness or emotional intelligence, communication, critical thinking and problem solving.
A recruitment shift is underway where employers are emphasizing “fit,” asking job candidates about their ability to work in diverse teams and changing environments.
Many employers now spend significant time, energy and resources rebuilding individuals’ skill sets, changing their mindsets and fostering a culture of teamwork. Such soft skills and experiences should be table stakes for students who graduate from Canadian post-secondary institutions.
The federal minister of employment, workforce development and disability inclusion, Carla Qualtrough, should introduce a formal measuring and recognizing of skills — including soft skills — acquired during post-secondary studies.
It is time for the minister to invite academic institutions and industry to come together and create a universal framework, starting with a common language of definitions and an accepted method to measure these skills.
Only then can academics and employers plan more effectively to allocate critical skills needed to ensure short-term economic recovery from the pandemic and long-term Canadian prosperity.
Without an objective measure to quantify the skills demanded by labour markets, post-secondary institutions cannot accurately assess demand for critical skills.
A team at Seneca International has started to investigate using AI and machine-learning techniques to quantify both technical and soft skills acquired across its programs. The goal is to discover soft-skills gaps and create soft-skills pathways between programs. The methodology uses Employment and Social Development Canada’s standard pan-Canadian skills taxonomy and is one example of how to establish a common measure of soft skills.
Part of the necessary shift is thinking about traditional postsecondary programs in a nontraditional way; that is, looking at the underlying skills and experiences within an academic program, quantifying these, and aligning them to job-classification systems. This approach allows someone to not only bring a resumé to a job interview but also provide a prospective employer with a documented list of skills and work experience that relate to a specific position.
A national skills and experience strategy would provide a common catalogue from which post-secondary educators could build curricula; students would graduate with foundational skills and literacies that would be clearly articulated for employers to assess.
When a student graduates now, there is no formal record of them ever acquiring these sought-after skills. Without a measure to quantify the amount of those skills acquired, labour markets cannot gauge the supply of these skills from academic institutions, so the market for these skills remains opaque. This ultimately limits our ability to address skills gaps in a changing, struggling economy — during and after the pandemic.
The systematic inability to formally articulate, teach and recognize soft skills drastically hampers some shifts we need to make to develop and recognize human capital in the 21st century.