Canadian Council on Learning | Conseil Canadien sur l'Apprentissage

Question Scans

Question 32: Are there targeted sectoral approaches that may be adopted in BC to gather labour demand and supply information directly from industry? (i.e. How can government better measure aspects of labour supply to accurately forecast skills imbalances?)

Overview

This Question Scan attempted to gather information identifying methods of collecting labour demand and supply information directly from industry.

Further, it determines how government can measure various aspects of labour supply more accurately to forecast needed skills in industries. A search of the literature found seventy-seven articles, with half discussing general labour market forecasting and the remainder sectoral and occupational-specific forecasting.

The literature lacks highly relevant articles on models or methods designed for skill shortage forecasting. In addition, most of the articles do not appear to be empirical in nature.

A large number of articles did not mention any models or approaches in their labour supply & demand forecasting studies. See the 18-page annotated bibliography for more information.

Based on these observations, a further review of evidence on this question is not suggested.

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