Canadian Council on Learning | Conseil Canadien sur l'Apprentissage

Doing the skill development two-step

Employees lose skills as students gain them, CCL research shows

December 21, 2006 Ottawa—There is a growing skills gap in the Canadian labour force: while Canadians have never been better educated, skill levels among employees are stalled and have failed to keep up with increases in the demand for skill.

A new report by the Canadian Council on Learning suggests that stagnating skill levels are the result of a phenomenon called skill loss.

The report, published Dec. 21, 2006, shows that while efforts to improve young people’s performance in high school and post-secondary education have been working—our dropout rates and post-secondary attainment statistics are encouraging—older Canadians are falling victim to skill loss.

“This should be familiar to all of us,” says Paul Cappon, CEO of the Canadian Council on Learning. “If we don’t use a language for years, we lose it. The math we once could do but haven’t practiced in years fades into memory. That phenomenon is common to all sorts of skills, including everyday workplace skills.”

Closing the skills gap is important to all Canadians. For workers, stronger skills are correlated with increased employability and higher incomes. For business, employees with higher skill levels are able to learn more quickly and increase corporate productivity. And for the economy, more highly-skilled employees earning more and raising productivity levels create positive economic growth.
 
“The interesting thing is that just as all parts of Canadian society benefit from increased literacy and numeracy, all parts of society have a part in solving this dilemma. The key is a coordinated strategy,” according to Cappon. Such a strategy would include employees taking responsibility for their own retraining and development, employers increasing their commitments to ongoing training programs, governments creating incentives for both employers and workers to offer and take training, and schools adopting best practices in workplace training.

“This is an issue for all Canadians, and all Canadian employers,” says Cappon. “The more employees and businesses that engage in this sort of coordinated skills development, the broader the impact on Canada and its economy.”

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The Canadian Council on Learning is an independent, not-for-profit corporation funded through an agreement with Human Resources and Social Development Canada. Its mandate is to promote and support evidence-based decisions about learning throughout all stages of life, from early childhood through to the senior years.

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