Professional Development
Canada’s economy hurt by lack of workplace trainingA new report suggests companies and individuals who fail to grasp the importance of lifelong learning will hurt Canada’s long-term economic prospects. JUDY MONCHUK |
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 [ 2007-05-29 ] |
© 2007 Jupiterimages Corporation
Canada already lags behind other industrialized countries in workforce training, the Canadian Council on Learning says in the report released Tuesday.
“Learning isn’t just going to school,” said Paul Cappon, the learning council’s CEO. “We are now in a global knowledge society and countries that don’t do well in lifelong learning won’t have the human capital to do well economically and socially.”
The Composite Learning Index was released at a Canadian Association of Municipal Administrators conference in Calgary.
The conclusions underscore information released in March, which found that fewer than one-third of adult Canadians in the workforce took part in job-related training — far behind workers in Denmark, Sweden, the United States, Finland, Switzerland and the United Kingdom.
That will harm Canada’s competitive chances in the long run.
“Canadians seem to be doing well learning in the school system, but when people get out of school they lose their competency in literacy, numeracy and problem solving,” said Cappon.
The report suggests skilled workers in the information age are becoming more and more valuable, but Canadian companies are not investing nearly enough in developing the skills and knowledge of their employees — whether on the job or in a classroom setting. And the skills they learned in school have little application to the workplace.
The consequences of that mismatch will soon become evident, said Cappon.
“We don’t have the training we need to be more productive. This is key because (more industrialized countries) have determined that work training is more effective than investment in capital infrastructure in increasing productivity. And our study shows we certainly are not developing our human capital as we should.”
Cappon is calling for a national action plan on job training, which would share costs between employers, employees and government. He adds it would also be important for efficiency measures to be put in place to assess the quality of that training.
The study of overall Canadian learning habits, first compiled in 2006, found a slight national improvement. The index is compiled using information from 4,500 communities across Canada and includes issues such as access to educational and training facilities, the Internet, volunteer opportunities and culture.
Calgary, which has been growing at a blistering rate in the last decade as people from across the country move there for a piece of the city’s economic boom, received the highest score of all Canadian cities, followed closely by Ottawa and Edmonton.
“Alberta communities are clearly blessed with many resources that influence learning conditions and social outcomes,” said Cappon.
The Canadian Council on Learning is a non-profit organization funded by the federal government aimed at promoting education from early childhood to the senior years.
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