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The importance of a skilled and adaptable workforce in troubled economic times
Fredericton, N.B.—Sporting a short red haircut, multiple ear piercings and a bright pink hoodie, Shelley Jones blends in perfectly with the undergrad crowd gathered at a coffee shop on the campus of St. Thomas University.
At 39, the bright-eyed Fredericton resident is one semester away from earning her bachelor of arts degree at the 75-year-old Catholic university, after which she’ll enrol in the school’s new bachelor of social work program.
If everything goes according to plan, Jones will exit the program in late 2010; just in time to enter a labour force hungry for trained social workers.
“I never thought I was cut out for university. I spent 19 years convincing myself that I couldn’t do it” she explains. “[But] once I made the decision to go, it was like a big revelation. Everything fell together perfectly.”
Her career shift, from minimum wage home-care worker to university graduate with a bright future, offers a perfect case study of how individual learners and Canada’s post-secondary sector can react to labour shortages.
Jones is among the thousands of adults that the Canadian Council on Learning (CCL) sees as an untapped market for the post-secondary sector. CCL’s 2008–2009 Report on the State of Post-secondary Education in Canada suggests adult learners represent a tremendous opportunity to replenish the labour pool with skilled, credentialed workers—the kind that can help the country survive the current global economic recession.
The report reveals that as declining birth rates (and retiring baby boomers) result in fewer available workers, universities, colleges and trades institutions should be looking beyond high school grads for new applicants.
Furthermore, research suggests that if post-secondary institutions fail to facilitate new learning opportunities for adults, the unemployed and low-income students, Canada will fall short of its growth targets and falter in its attempt to maintain international competitiveness into the future.
Jones is a case in point.
Four years ago, she was earning $7 an hour working at a health care agency that placed her with a seriously ill elderly couple who relied on her for their every need. “I just didn’t feel right,” she says. “Their lives were in my hands and I wasn’t trained to react if something happened. It was too much responsibility.”
She stuck with the job until 2005, when she took a much-needed vacation. While she was away, replacement staff accidentally over-medicated one of her clients, sending him to hospital. The man’s family fired the company, which left Jones with a reduced schedule—from 37 hours a week to just 12. After two decades in the workforce she suddenly found herself unable to make a living.
“It was kind of a good thing, in the end,” she says. “The experience taught me that I wanted to do more with my life than scrape out a living. I wanted to be able to do more for people, to be able to help people… I wanted to do other things, volunteer—do mission work for my church. And I knew I was going to have to go back to school to do that.”
Jones is certainly not alone. As result of the economic downturn, thousands of Canadians are suddenly facing similar predicaments, including countless auto-sector and natural resource workers who are currently reconsidering their futures.
For her part, Jones realized she needed to upgrade her skills but lacked the confidence to leap into a campus full of students who were half her age.
A disappointing attempt at the University of New Brunswick when she was 18 made her believe she wasn’t smart enough to go to university. Nearly two decades of low-paying jobs forced her to re-evaluate her options, and her outlook.
Thanks to a chance encounter with a job counselor at a Government of Canada unemployment office, she turned herself around.
Jones’ career prospects are good. As a social work graduate who is fluent in both English and French, she’s a perfect fit for the province’s Department of Family and Community Services, which is on the hunt for credentialed workers.
Social work grads are in a minority of liberal arts students with skills that lead directly to the job market. And according to CCL’s latest PSE report, universities and colleges can do a much better job of streaming graduates into careers by matching programs to the skills employers are demanding.
It is now up to universities, colleges and private institutions to make the connection between credentials and skill sets clearer—to help both students and their potential employers. Something that the European Union recently addressed with the passing of a Charter on Lifelong Learning; a list of 10 goals related to lifelong learning that was signed by the European University Association in Fall 2008.
Dr. Rick Davey is president of Yorkville University, an Ontario and New Brunswick-based private career college offering diplomas and degrees, along with an online Masters of Counselling degree.
Davey says employers know exactly what they are getting from Yorkville University graduates because they help dictate what goes into the programs that are offered.
He says that his school has a 90 per cent placement rate, in part because of the administration’s constant communication with employers through program advisory committees.
“You need outstanding marketplace connections to make this happen, and that’s what we have,” he says.
Adult learners and mid-career students are Yorkville’s main target, marketed to with direct advertising and coached into programs with intensive counselling and study support.
“One of the features of private education is the admissions process. Yes it’s a sales pitch, but it is also a counselling process,” he says. “We spend a lot of time with students, talking about how they learn and where their interests lie, setting them up with study groups and other supports. We do a lot of hand-holding but it works, because it suits their needs as learners.”
Jones agrees with that universities and colleges need to do more to both attract mature students and help them succeed. She leads a support group for adult learners who have made enormous sacrifices to return to school, often leaving small children and partners to come to campus, raising families on student loans, and frequently lacking appropriate advice from academic counseling services to guide them into productive careers.
“Public universities are geared for 18-year-olds. Adult learners have to make their own home and find their own community and support on campus. They have to make their own way,” she says.
Her friend and fellow student Suzie Shurtleff, 29, agrees. Shurtleff is an English major who returned to school two years ago after working as an after-school program coordinator at a local preschool. She wants to graduate with a PhD by the time she is 35, and instruct at the university level.
“Guidance for mature students is severely lacking,” Shurtleff says. “I need to know exactly what I need and there is nobody to tell me. I need somebody to advise me on the best and quickest way to get to my goal – which is to support myself through teaching.”
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