Canadian postsecondary institutions are facing evolving demands as employers look for new ways to bridge skill gaps in the labour market.Getty Images
There’s a growing disconnect between the skills postsecondary students are graduating with and the skills employers need. Rapid digitalization and advancements in areas like AI and big data are driving demand for technical skills, while hybridized workplace cultures are placing more emphasis on interpersonal and communication skills. While businesses are pushing for a balance between hard and soft skills, many schools aren’t delivering.
“Historically, Canada’s postsecondary sector and labour market has not been especially aligned in graduating new grads for the jobs that are in demand,” says Matthew McKean, chief research and development officer at the Business + Higher Education Roundtable (BHER) – a non-partisan, not-for-profit organization bringing together some of Canada’s largest companies and leading postsecondary institutions.
“But there’s a new urgency to that conversation as a result of demographic and technological change,” he says.
BHER has been surveying businesses on in-demand skills since 2014. In its latest report, technical skills became one of the top five types of skills employers require for entry-level jobs. However, finding enough workers with these skills is a major barrier to recruitment. One of the biggest reasons why is that the types of technical skills needed are getting more sophisticated.
“Back in 2018, the technical skills that employers were looking for were more relaxed, a bit generic, like computer science,” says Mr. McKean. “But now we’re seeing a more specific subset of technical skills like AI, big data, cybersecurity.”
According to BHER’s 2022 Skills Survey Report, which surveyed 95 of the largest Canadian private-sector companies employing more than 830,000 Canadians, 61 per cent say they expect more from recent graduates than they did five years ago.
That demand is driving employers to build stronger relationships with postsecondary institutions through initiatives like work-integrated learning, where students engage in real-world projects and research with employers.
According to the latest data from the Council of Ontario Universities, Ontario’s universities entered into more than 670 industry partnerships during 2020 and 2021 in a bid to fill local, regional and provincial skills shortages.
Joel Blit, a professor of economics at the University of Waterloo and expert on the economy of innovation and disruptive technology, says initiatives like work-integrated learning are key parts of setting students up for success after graduation. But he also cautions against overemphasizing in-demand skills.
“If we’re training students for the exact skills that are currently in demand, we might find those skills are no longer useful in five or ten years,” Mr. Blit says, adding that transferable skills like critical thinking and communication are equally important. “These are skills they’re going to use their whole life and that they can use to pivot if whatever career they choose is disrupted.”
More and more, colleges, universities and other postsecondary institutions are expected to align with organizational needs by pumping out students armed with both in-demand technical skills and softer, complementary skills like communication and entrepreneurialism. To effectively fill the gaps, many of these institutions will need to change the way they deliver education.
“The days of higher education being four years and then you’re done for life are gone,” says Mr. Blit. Rather, he argues for a new model where students spend the first few years building broad skills like critical thinking and communication, before moving into more technical skillsets in the later years of their education. “Then they would come back whenever they need to upgrade their skills, " he says.
Continuing education and upskilling or reskilling have gained momentum as Canadians adapt to the needs of the market. According to data from the Council of Ontario Universities, more than 119,000 students were enrolled in continuing education programs between 2020–2021 to upgrade or augment their skills – a 28 per cent increase from the 2017–2018 year.
Meanwhile, a Statistics Canada report from 2021 looking at people who entered into a college program after completing a Bachelor’s degree found the additional education wasn’t meant to replace the initial degree. Instead, it was meant to give them “more specialized, labour-market-directed applications of skills.”
The data show students are increasingly looking to increase their employability with more education. But Mr. McKean at BHER says another overlooked element of the disconnect is poor communication. Students don’t know how to talk about the skills they have, and employers don’t know how to talk about what they want. “Maybe for a particular job you think you need a data specialist and maybe there’s someone that did a history degree but has that same skillset and doesn’t articulate their skills that way,” he says.
This shift is forcing employers to get more specific about what they need. “The market hasn’t had to do that before,” Mr. McKean says. “The employer just assumed if they posted a job for an economist or a carpenter, that was a proxy for an assumption about the skills you had – but that’s no longer the case.”
Universities, for their part, can help close the gap by teaching students how to better articulate their skills and knowledge before they graduate.
“[In the past] universities didn’t have to claim ownership of the fact that they were training the work force,” says Mr. McKean. “But the stakes have changed.”