Last week, Jason Kenney said what many have been thinking. “I stand up in front of business audiences and say: You guys have been, to some extent, freeloading on the public training system,” the Employment Minister told the Canada 2020 Conference in Ottawa. “We need to see businesses put more resources into skills development.”
Now, here’s a point around which small government conservatives like Kenney and big idea liberals can come together. So let’s run with this.
The idea Canada suffers from a ‘skills gap’ is one of the great economic lies sold to the current generation. We have all heard it – there are too many people without jobs, too many jobs without people.
Not so. Or, at least, not so in the way they want to sell it.
The mantra, repeated ad nauseum by corporations to young people, continues to be Canada is filling up with overeducated, yet undertrained, workers who can reference Hamlet, but don’t know how to weld. (Darn you, liberal arts.) Their advice? Ditch university, learn a trade and start working in the Tar Sands.
Check. Check. Check. Economy fixed.
Corporations have used the ‘skills gap’ fallacy to justify all sorts of bad behaviour from gutted internship programs to delayed hiring to flooding their industries with low-pay temporary foreign workers. Repeated often enough by people in power, this simple-minded solution is then parroted as gospel by the public. (Sort of the Fox News method of information distribution.)
Sure, if you choose to view the economy through a narrow, strictly anecdotal lens, then there are shortages in certain industries – namely welders. But we’re talking about a bigger issue than filling a few rigs out West.
For the last 30 years, we have lived in a world where companies refuse to see beyond the next quarter, let alone cast their vision a generation or two ahead. The price of that short-sighted, quarter-to-quarter outlook is now coming home to roost.
This generation is the most educated, most technically savvy and, perhaps, even most creative generation we have seen in some time. They are smart and employable, and could learn anything for any employer.
Their disadvantage, however, is that their entry into the job market has been retarded. Massive debt, Boomers refusing to leave the job force and stagnant hiring have all contributed to the delay. Their seeming immaturity is caused by the fact their parents’ parents were established in the job market for years by the time this generation will get its first full-time footing.
And then there is the fact employers are no longer interested in what Kenney described as “employer-led, demand-driven training.”
That seems counter-intuitive. All these complaints about a shortage of skilled workers, yet corporate spending on training has been in decline for the past two decades, Maclean’s magazine pointed out last month.
Conference Board of Canada researcher Dan Munro cited numbers in that same article showing Canadian employers spent $705 per employee on training costs last year. While up $17 from 2010, that number is down 40 per cent from its peak in 1993. Meanwhile, only about 31 per cent of Canadians participated in some type of non-formal job-related education or training in 2009.
That’s not, as they say, putting their money where their gap is.
And now, corporations have offloaded the responsibility for training, along with a heaping helping of guilt, onto postsecondary institutions, especially universities.
“There’s a funny dynamic that may be occurring between employers and the higher education system,” Munro said. “There are increasing calls by employers for educators to do more job-ready training. But these calls have been increasing at the same time employers’ spending on training has been dropping.”
Kenney’s comments are late, but welcome to the debate. For a conservative to put this kind of public pressure on employers will fuel this debate in different corners.