Innovation is changing the way Canadians work and the skills needed to succeed in the labour market. The introduction of disruptive technologies such as automation, robotics, and artificial intelligence is creating both opportunities and challenges for workers, employers, and skills and training service providers to adapt and keep up.
Budget 2017 committed to establish a new organization tasked with:
- identifying the skills sought and required by employers;
- exploring new and innovative approaches to skills development; and
- sharing information to inform future investments and programming.
To fulfill this commitment, in Budget 2018, the Government announced it would launch Future Skills this spring. Future Skills will bring together expertise from multiple sectors and leverage experience from partners across the country. It will include:
- Future Skills Council: a Council, appointed by the Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour, on emerging skills and workforce trends; and
- Future Skills Centre: an arms-length research Centre focused on developing, testing and rigorously measuring new and innovative approaches to skills assessment and development.
Provinces and territories invest considerably in identifying, testing, and adopting new approaches within their networks of partnerships with Indigenous governments and organizations, other orders of government and stakeholders including employers, industry, educational institutions, and community-based organizations. Future Skills will complement and not duplicate provincial and territorial activities and investments including innovation entities, which have been established in a number of jurisdictions. The Future Skills Centre will collaborate with the provinces and territories in areas of mutual interest and work to mitigate duplication of efforts. Similarly, collaboration with intergovernmental bodies with similar mandates including the Forum of Labour Market Ministers (FLMM) and the Labour Market Information Council (LMIC) will be instrumental to ensure complementarity of efforts, priority alignment, knowledge sharing and collaboration on projects when deemed appropriate. For example, the LMIC is responsible for addressing the need for more granular local labour market information and for disseminating LMI for Canadians. The Future Skills Centre will complement this knowledge by taking a more future lens focus, identifying emerging skills in-demand in the labour market and identifying the best training practices that will help Canadians gain the skills needed for being resilient in an evolving labour market.
The Future Skills Centre will also support experimentation and measurement to produce reliable evidence on "what works" to improve the responsiveness of skills development approaches to emerging changes in the labour market. Once the evidence and the practices have been developed and refined with sufficient rigour and quality, provincial and territorial governments, Indigenous governments and organizations, other orders of government, not-for-profit organizations, and for-profit organizations can support the adoption and integration of these practices into wide scale service delivery.
By sharing "what works" across the skills development and training ecosystem to inform future investments and programming, Future Skills will contribute towards:
- Helping Canadians make informed decisions about the skills needed for the future as they adapt to changes in the Labour market;
- Increasing access to quality training and supports that address the changing nature of work, especially for underrepresented and disadvantaged groups; and
- Supporting transformative labour market policy and program innovation to ensure that Canada's labour market and training systems remain future-fit.
The Future Skills Centre will work towards achieving the following objectives:
- Improve evidence on the skills sought and required in the workplace now and into the future to assist Canadians in making training decisions;
- Prototype, test and rigorously measure innovative approaches to identify emerging in-demand skills and evidence-based effective training models; and
- Publicly and widely disseminate information, analysis and evidence on in-demand skills and on successful training solutions to inform and support future investments in skills development.