2022

New APCDA Scholarship supports practitioners, students to attend Cannexus conference

July 14, 2022By

CERIC is partnering for the first time with the Asia Pacific Career Development Association to offer scholarships to APCDA members to attend the virtual portion of the 2023 hybrid Cannexus conference. Announced during a keynote from CERIC Executive Director Riz Ibrahim at the APCDA/IAEVG 2022 international conference, the scholarships will allow 15 career development practitioners or students from non-high-income countries to participate. 

“Scholarships are such a wonderful way to spark surprising new developments in our field,” said Marilyn Maze, Executive Director of APCDA. “The energy of these enthusiastic winners added to the insights they gain from the experience helps to propel new career development activities in parts of the world that are in greatest need. APCDA is grateful for the scholarships CERIC has offered to Cannexus.” 

The APCDA Cannexus Scholarship includes free registration to the virtual conference – to be held January 23-25, 2023 both online and in-person in Ottawa, Canada – as well as access to 150 session recordings for up to six months. APCDA will accept the scholarship applications and determine the recipients.  

“This scholarship serves to further extend access to the world-class education and networking at Cannexus across the globe to current and aspiring professionals who might not otherwise be able to attend,” said Ibrahim. “The participation of more APCDA members will also enrich the conference experience for all attendees who can learn from their Asia Pacific counterparts.” 

Scholarships are available to: 

  1. Students earning a degree in counselling or related field, or students in a certification program in the career development field, or former students who graduated from such programs within the last five years 
  2. Career practitioners engaged in professional development 

Applicants must also meet these requirements: 

  1. Live in a “Not High-income Country*” 
  2. Plan to attend the entire conference 
  3. Your employer will not pay for you to attend 
  4. Can explain how this conference will help you to provide better career services in your home country 

The deadline for applications is October 1, 2022. 

Cannexus is Canada’s Career Development Conference. The largest conference of its kind in the country, Cannexus has attracted more than 1,200 participants in-person and 2,300 virtually. Cannexus23 will welcome career development professionals and related stakeholders from Canada and around the world to exchange information and explore innovative approaches in the areas of career and workforce development. 

* Examples of countries classified as High-income by the World Bank include Australia, Canada, Hong Kong SAR of China, Japan, Korea, Macao SAR of China, New Zealand, Singapore, United States and Taiwan. Residents of High-income countries are not eligible for this scholarship. 

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2021 printed on road going through forest2022

Resilience and Reimagining: CERIC releases 2021 Annual Report

July 4, 2022By

The 2021 CERIC Annual Report, with a theme of “Resilience and Reimagining,” reflects on a year that brought a sense of renewed hope that the colossal global disruptions caused by the pandemic were in some ways behind us. While it sometimes felt like we were taking two steps forward and one step back, it was the feeling that we were moving forward nonetheless that defined the year.

We started 2021 by hosting our first-ever virtual Cannexus conference, which drew an incredible response. As Board Chair André Raymond and Executive Director Riz Ibrahim outline in their Leadership Message, if there was any time that we could embrace the idea of a virtual community, this was it. The economic uncertainties that underpinned the year prior still remained and we continued to offer compelling rates to encourage more participation from groups and students. We also continued to leverage some of our new international partners to offer a set of globally focused sessions at the conference.

As we progressed through the year, there was a sense that the tide had turned and we could consider in-person events. In the end, our commitment to maintaining a high-calibre and broadly accessible conference led us to forego an in-person gathering in favour of planning a second virtual conference in 2022.

It was important to have a feeling of continuity amid these changes: we continued to develop a survey of Canadian businesses, offer webinars, publish books and fund projects. We translated one of our resources into multiple languages, reflecting an internationalization of interest in our work.

Internally, we started to define the organizational values we felt were needed to guide us toward the fulfilment of our dual mandates of “Promoting career development as a priority for the public good” and “Building career development knowledge, mindsets and competencies.” We also started to do work around defining and developing our equity, diversity and inclusion priorities.

Highlights for CERIC that promote career development for public good:

  • Published a new edition of our popular Playbook, Retain and Gain: Career Management for the Public Sector, to support public sector employers in developing an inclusive, agile and equipped workforce
  • Launched a Careers and Canadians discussion series, starting with guest former Saskatchewan Deputy Minister Alastair MacFadden, to explore the value of connecting careers thinking to the development, delivery and measurement of public goods and services
  • Surveyed 501 Canadian employers with Environics Research Institute to update and expand understanding of the state of career development in the Canadian workplace
  • Published the “Career Pivots” issue of CERIC’s Careering magazine, which highlighted how, with the support of career education and career professionals, Canadians can develop the change-ready mindset needed to thrive
  • Updated CERIC’s funding priorities to include career mindsets as a new key funding priority area
  • Worked with the media to raise the profile of career development, including articles published in Policy Options and Canadian HR Reporter and an interview on CBC Radio
  • Engaged with many organizations around shared advocacy goals, systems change and joint learning, including Future Skills Centre, the Institute of Public Administration of Canada, the Century Initiative, the Labour Market Information Council and the OECD

Key achievements for CERIC that build career development knowledge:

In addition to these highlights, as well as inclusion of financial statements, the CERIC 2021 Annual Report also includes an acknowledgement of CERIC staff this past year as well as a special thank you to the CERIC Board and Advisory Committee volunteers who helped us navigate these challenging times and to our funder, The Counselling Foundation of Canada, for its unwavering support.

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2021

The new abnormal: Revisiting workplace presenteeism during COVID-19

June 17, 2022By

By Tade Owodunni (Cannexus23 GSEP Award Winner)

Preface 

As the second quarter of 2022 beckons, things appear to be fast returning to normal and everyone is gradually settling back into work. Organizations in Canada are fast embracing the new normal and adopting more flexible workplace practices. In the new normal, employee health concerns have remained a major subject at management meetings.  

Yet, things aren’t quite so normal. The now not-so-new sheriff in town is COVID-19, which has taken the world by storm and surpassed other health conditions that have plagued the work environment and workplace performance over the years, such as stress, heart-related ailments, sleep problems, allergies, body pain and depressive mood (McGregor et al., 2018). COVID quickly gained top-of-mind status with most employees who, by the nature of their employment, must report physically to work.  

Now into its third year as a significant health concern, COVID-19 has affected the world of work perhaps more than any other development in the modern era (Pieh et al., 2021). Its highly contagious nature, along with its tendency to periodically mutate into even more contagious variants, continually stretches the limits of modern medicine as the world struggles to find a solution. The ceaseless pressure to maintain productivity and profitability as the world begins to embrace the new normal presents new challenges with consequences that extend beyond the workplace.  

Workplace absenteeism and presenteeism  

The life of the modern-day business manager is not an easy one. They have a lot to contend with. While absenteeism remains a common disruptor to workplace activity, its parallel component, presenteeism, reintroduces itself as a clear and present danger for all organizations – particularly in the wake of COVID-19. Whilst absenteeism refers to a worker’s absence from work due to illness (either personally or as a caretaker for a sick dependent), presenteeism describes a situation where a legitimately ill person continues to physically come to the workplace (Howard et al., 2012). Where such an illness is as infectious as COVID-19, the consequences are not only monumental but extend beyond the workplace and assume a societal challenge of paradigmatic proportion.  

Presenteeism during COVID-19 

The costs and risk factors associated with workers coming into work while sick with COVID-19 are an enormous and relatively novel situation that organizations are forced to cope with. Where health conditions are non-contagious, sickness presenteeism has been observed to have some benefits to ailing staff, as the work environment offers structure, builds self-esteem and provides opportunities for social engagement and support (Kinman & Grant, 2022). Nonetheless, there is evidence that suggests that working while ill can delay, rather than expedite, the process of recovery, thus increasing the risk of future health problems and sickness absence (Skagen, 2016; Kinman & Grant, 2022).  

Inherent factors that encourage presenteeism  

Unfortunately, the pressures associated with having to turn up at work, especially in non-remote, in-person work sectors like retail, construction and hospitality, compel workers to take difficult decisions and go to work despite their ill health. They may also face the risk of lost hourly wages or even unemployment if they stay home sick.  

“Unhealthy” workplace culture can also be a factor. Employees may be gaslighted into self-doubt and question the seriousness of their own conditions because they are reluctant to let down their managers and colleagues. This may be a particular concern in situations where staffing levels are low or organizations are faced with other challenges that threaten their survival (Kinman, 2019). Workers may fear that their managers and colleagues do not consider them sufficiently unwell to necessitate time off from work if their symptoms are mild. This further constrains workers to put on a brave face and face the challenge of working during illness, unwittingly spreading it to other colleagues. The unfortunate long-term consequences, beyond prevailing a contagion that could otherwise be averted, includes reports that some people have continued to experience symptoms such as chronic fatigue, weakness, low productivity and cognitive difficulties several months later (Wise, 2020).  

Summary, reflections and further research direction 

The simple solution to stalling workplace presenteeism would be to encourage sick employees to stay at home and call in sick when they observe that they are experiencing COVID-19 symptoms, however mild (Pieh et al., 2021). Unfortunately, in the real world, things are never quite so simple. Therefore, sacrifices have to be made by both employees, who should conscientiously concede to reduced income during their periods of ill health, and managers, who should consider introducing half-pay conditions for workers performing in-person roles whose absenteeism is demonstrably a result of COVID-19-related illness. This demonstrates a sense of fairness to the affected employee and is a gesture of encouragement to avert the spread of the disease.  

Workplace presenteeism has a negative impact on employees, their co-workers and the community. It can exacerbate health problems and increase long-term sickness absence for the worker, increase accidents and injuries for the worker and co-workers, and transmit contagious illness to the community in which the workplace is embedded (Kinman, 2019) 

Tade Owodunni is a doctoral student in Business Administration at Royal Roads University, a Nigerian-trained lawyer, corporate governance practitioner and certified compliance and ethics professional. He emerged as the best graduating student (Nigeria) from his Masters of Business Administration (MBA) program at Business School Netherlands in 2018. Tade’s research interests include corporate governance themes, small business growth and career development subjects.  

References

Howard, K. J., Howard, J. T., & Smyth, A. F. (2012). The problem of absenteeism and presenteeism in the workplace. In Handbook of occupational health and wellness (pp. 151-179). Springer, Boston, MA. 

Kinman, G. (2019). Sickness presenteeism at work: prevalence, costs and management. 

Kinman, G., & Grant, C. (2021). Presenteeism during the COVID-19 pandemic: risks and solutions. Occupational medicine, 71(6-7), 243-244.  

McGregor, A., Ashbury, F., Caputi, P., & Iverson, D. (2018). A preliminary investigation of health and work-environment factors on presenteeism in the workplace. Journal of occupational and environmental medicine, 60(12), e671-e678. 

Pieh, C., Budimir, S., Delgadillo, J., Barkham, M., Fontaine, J. R., & Probst, T. (2021). Mental health during COVID-19 lockdown in the United Kingdom. Psychosomatic medicine, 83(4), 328-337.  

Skagen, K., & Collins, A. M. (2016). The consequences of sickness presenteeism on health and wellbeing over time: a systematic review. Social Science & Medicine, 161, 169-177. 

Wise, J. (2020). Long covid: doctors call for research and surveillance to capture disease. bmj, 370. 

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Legacy learning and career development: Higher-education students as agents of change

June 17, 2022By

By Hannah Celinski (Cannexus23 GSEP Award Winner)

Students are faced with a variety of daunting tasks. They navigate institutional expectations, manage time for their studies and homework, often while working multiple jobs and contributing to a household by way of care for others, duties around the house and balancing their budget. Further, they are subjected to a changing world full of environmental, economic and societal uncertainty. The “evolving future” has become as unpredictable as it is unstable, and within these challenges lies the importance of fostering “the lifelong process of managing learning, work, leisure, and transitions” (CERIC, n.d.).  

I live in Abbotsford, BC. In 2021, we navigated the global pandemic, raging forest fires, a heat dome and a devastating flood. Our community remains shaken to the core by these unprecedented challenges. This is one town, in one province of our massive country. Our challenges are unique to Abbotsford, but the outlook is equally complex across Canada. During such challenging times, the importance of career influencers – “professionals [who] have the potential to influence students in their careers through their role and everyday practice” – is undeniable (Ho, 2019, p. 137). We need students to become agents of change, and career development is one path to hope for our people, communities and world. 

My PhD research focuses on the role of legacy in pedagogy (Legacy Learning). I examine Plato’s theory of the loadstone (attracting students to you like a magnet and infusing them with your knowledge and ability to attract further students); Maxine Greene’s consideration of learning through sedimentation (information builds up as sediment and is passed along to the next person in a synthesized form) (Greene, 2013); the role of mirror neurons in learning (you neurologically “practise” what you observe and the effect can be strengthened through relationship) (Zardi et al., 2021); and Indigenous ways of teaching and learning, amplifying the work of Sarah Davidson and Robert Davidson in their book, Potlatch as Pedagogy: Learning Through Ceremony (2018). Davidson & Davidson point to the importance of process, with failure as an option and celebration of the journey as the focus as opposed to assessment. 

I propose that legacy is a pathway to exponential growth, but our students are currently drowning in a tidal wave of information that flows over them through technology (Chan et al., 2015). Students are squeezed between the potency of exponentially growing knowledge they receive verbally, physically and affectively through their instructors, and the flow of information coming at them from their devices. To combat this evolving issue and turn the focus on successfully developing and producing agents of change, I propose including mindfulness and reflective practices as part of the higher-education curriculum in tandem with David Boud’s “feedback loop” – an ongoing conversation between the instructor and student to promote learning (Carless & Boud, 2018, p. 1318). 

So, how does career development fit into this conversation? By framing curriculum within a Legacy Learning context, the evolution of a career is framed as a process achieved by considering students’ past experiences in relation to their current place in the process, and how that feeds their future evolution. Each journey is unique. There is no longer an arrival employment opportunity. Rather, future stops encourage community involvement by furthering equity, diversity and inclusion as a vital aspect of society’s future; averting ecological impacts of current and past practices; and actively engaging with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Each student has an important part to play in our future, but they will need our stories, support, guidance and encouragement to get there. As I said earlier, we need agents of change, and to get there, students will need everything we have to offer. 

Hannah Celinski is an Assistant Professor and Department Head of Arts Studies at The University of the Fraser Valley. She began as a music theatre performer in Toronto, eventually opening Aerial Dance & Acro Academy in Abbotsford before returning to academia. Celinski is currently pursuing a PhD in Educational Theory and Practice: Curriculum and Pedagogy at Simon Fraser University. She has a Master of Arts in English from Simon Fraser University, a Bachelor of Arts in English (Honours) from The University of the Fraser Valley and a Music Theatre Performance Diploma from Sheridan College. 

References

Boud, D. & Carless, D. (2018). The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education. 43(8), 1315-1325. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02602938.2018.1463354  

Chan, N., Walker, C., & Gleaves, A. (2015). An exploration of students’ lived experiences of using smartphones in diverse learning contexts using a hermeneutic phenomenological approach. Computers and Education, 82, 96-106. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.11.001 

CERIC. (n.d.). Glossary of career development. https://ceric.ca/glossary-of-career-development 

Davidson, S. & Davidson, R. (2018). Potlatch as pedagogy: Learning through ceremony. Portage & Main.  

Greene, M. (2013). Curriculum and consciousness. In David Flinders (Ed.), Curriculum studies reader (2nd ed., pp. 134-147). Taylor and Francis.   

Hagendoorn, I. (2004). Some speculative hypotheses about the nature and perception of dance and choreography. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 11(3-4), 79-110. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SU17_clyZ_l8m7SG98c8kjY2pN1AgqHM/view 

Ho, C. (2019). Professionals in post-secondary education: Conceptions of career influence. (Doctoral dissertation, Simon Fraser University, Surrey, Canada). Retrieved from http://summit.sfu.ca/item/18827 

Richter, D. (2007). The critical tradition: Classic texts and contemporary trends. Bedford/St. Martin’s. 

Zardi, Andrea, Carlotti, Edoardo Giovanni, Pontremoli, Alessandro, & Morese, Rosalba. (2021). Dancing in Your Head: An Interdisciplinary Review. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 649121–649121. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.649121 

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Winning in an open relationship: A partnership in higher education with industry

June 17, 2022By

By Sonja Johnston

The “skills gap” (e.g., Lapointe & Turner, 2020; Mishra et al., 2019; RBC, 2019), or the misalignment of graduate capability with employer expectations, comes back to higher education to renovate education outcomes to align to industry desires for skill competency. However, this moving target of desirable skills in a tumultuous landscape for employment makes hitting the target nearly impossible. The literature in this space has been growing for decades, but the COVID-19 pandemic brought the challenge centre stage, as economic recovery will be directly affected by the ability of the workforce to adapt and innovate. 

Solutions to close the gap have focused on supporting students to acquire skills as directed by industry insights and hiring needs. What if the narrative was reframed to explore collaborative and generative learning experiences that are co-created by industry partners and soon-to-be graduates?  

One such example features the open learning partnership with e-commerce software leader Shopify (Shopify Open Learning, n.d.). This multinational, publicly traded, Canadian firm “is a leading provider of essential internet infrastructure for commerce, offering trusted tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size” (Shopify Company Info, n.d.). Shopify’s open learning partnership allows higher-education programs to implement authentic learning experiences in curriculum by allowing students to create fully functional Shopify stores. Approved courses can utilize access to rewarding Shopify-based activities and students can earn digital badges to recognize their achievements in addition to the course credit.  

During the pandemic, businesses were affected by health restrictions and forced to consider how they engaged with customers. As the Shopify platform evolved, students were able to learn about business demands and pivots in real time. Graduates enter the workplace with an authentic and experiential view of store design and strategic customer experience considerations. Shopify gains client insights from the students and an educated base of graduates ready to hit the ground running as entrepreneurs and employees. 

This open (platform) relationship is an exchange of insight, expertise, current operations, feedback and authentic learning with no financial obligation to higher education. This iterative feedback loop functions differently than industry just providing insights on skills that are desired. The use of platforms provides authentic and experiential learning with the value-added opportunity for micro credentialling (i.e. digital badges). The win for all involved stakeholders is visible, and can pivot as the environment requires. The invitation for industry leaders to consider open relationships with higher education is on the table for the taking! 

Disclaimer: I am a graduate student in educational research examining models for graduate workplace readiness. As a post-secondary instructor, I use this open platform in an entrepreneurship course. I am not compensated in any way from Shopify. I wish to acknowledge credit for the pioneering of this Open Learning Platform to Pam Bovey Armstrong and Polina Buchan at St. Lawrence College in Ontario, Canada.

Sonja Johnston is a collaborative, multidisciplinary scholar with nearly a decade of experience in curriculum design and instruction in multiple post-secondary institutions. She is currently a PhD student in the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary, specializing in Learning Sciences. Sonja’s research focuses on higher education and workplace readiness. 

References

Lapointe, S., & Turner, J. (2020). Leveraging the skills of social sciences and humanities graduates. Skills Next 2020. https://fsc-ccf.ca/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/UniversityGraduateSkillsGap-PPF-JAN2020-EN-FINAL.pdf  

Mishra, P. T., Mishra, A., & Chowhan, S. S. (2019). Role of higher education in bridging the skill gap. Universal Journal of Management, 7(4), 134-139. https://doi.org/10.13189/ujm.2019.070402 

RBC. (2019, May). Bridging the gap: What Canadians told us about the skills revolution [report]. RBC Thought Leadership. https://www.rbc.com/dms/enterprise/futurelaunch/_assets-custom/pdf/RBC-19-002-SolutionsWanted-04172019-Digital.pdf  

Shopify. (n.d.). Company Info. https://news.shopify.com/company-info 

Shopify. (n.d.). Open Learning. https://www.shopify.ca/open-learning 

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Do values matter? Exploring the factors that encourage employees to commit to physical activity during the COVID-19 in relation to their work performance

June 17, 2022By

By Ahmed Mohamed

Government legislation enacted during COVID-19 constricted business to work remotely and students to learn from home. Such widespread restrictions on human activity stimulated an increase in scholarly research in the social sciences. Research productivity increased by 35% in the United States within 10 weeks of the start of COVID-19 lockdowns (Cui, Ding, and Zhu, 2020).  

Still, little is being done to understand why regular engagement in physical activities declined for some and continued for others. We ground this qualitative research on conservation of resources theory (especially personal resources: cognitive, physical and affective) to determine whether previous experience in teleworking and personal and organizational resources might have motivated people to continue to engage in physical activities while working from home. Indeed, the unprecedented conditions of COVID-19 require people to utilize their personal resources as efficiently as possible to satisfy job and physical and mental health demands. Our research answer two questions. 

First, does physical activity pre-pandemic provide non-experienced telecommuters with more resources and better work performance during pandemic? The second question asks, what specific factors motivate them to engage in physical activities during the pandemic? We interviewed 20 faculty and staff at York University in Canada. Participants who perceived physical activity as an intrinsic value before the pandemic practised physical activity during the pandemic, maintained their personal resources and coped with the pandemic demands. However, participants who are intrinsically motivated to practice physical activity, because of its known benefits from pre-pandemic experience, were less engaged in physical activities and lost personal resources due to family and work demands experienced during the pandemic.  

We conclude that physical activity is indirectly predicting work performance through the mediation role of personal resources. We recommend extending this study to cover gender, financial stability and culture in two contrasting contexts, during and post-COVID-19. 

Ahmed Mohamed is a Queen’s University business graduate, holding a Master of International Business degree with over 10 years of international experience in the business industry. Throughout his career, Mohamed helped multinational corporations in client servicing, sales, marketing and human resources. Mohamed is passionate about academic research, assisting professors and the research community in various research areas related to human resource management. Additionally, presenting research topics at different conferences and finding solutions to industry challenges is where Mohamed sees himself growing and developing. Currently, Mohamed is a third-year PhD candidate in Human Resource Management at York University. 

References

Cui, R., Ding, H., & Zhu, F. (2020). Gender inequality in research productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic. arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.10194. 

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Image of Careering magazine cover on yellow background with text: Spring-Summer 2022 The Great Careers Disconnect2022

Spring-Summer issue of Careering dives into ‘The Great Careers Disconnect’

June 15, 2022By

For “The Great Careers Disconnect” issue of Careering magazine, we asked people working in all areas of career development to reflect on the question: What gaps are you seeing in career services, career education, the labour market and the workplace – and what are your ideas to address them?

Articles include:

Careering magazine is Canada’s Magazine for Career Development Professionals and is the official publication of CERIC. It is published three times a year and includes select content in French. Subscribe to receive your free copy. You can also access past issues for free online.  

The theme for the Fall 2022 issue of Careering magazine will be released soon. Check back on ceric.ca/careering for the call for article proposals or sign up for CERIC’s free CareerWise Weekly newsletter to get the latest updates.

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Heat sparks fly out in construction site due to two men using grinding machineCareering

The skills-gap paradox

June 14, 2022By
Canada’s small and medium-sized enterprises say they’re facing a skills gap. So, why aren’t they investing in talent? 

Malika Asthana

Author headshotSkills don’t last forever, but many of our current models for skills development assume they do. As the need for skills changes alongside rapid technological advancements and demographic shifts, employers will need to consider how to keep their employees’ skills fresh – and our learning systems must adapt as well. This is particularly true when it comes to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) that support millions of jobs. But can they do it?

To better understand the dynamics facing SMEs to support employees in lifelong learning, D2L commissioned Innovative Research Group to conduct two surveys of employers and employees. Focused on SMEs with 20 to 499 employees, this new research provides a snapshot of the current state of lifelong learning in small and medium-sized businesses in both the United States and Canada and reveals concerning gaps for employers and policymakers alike to address.

What’s happening with SMEs

D2L research shows that Canadian SMEs are facing a worrisome situation as they look at their future talent needs compared with their current talent realities. Only 21% of decision-makers at Canadian SMEs report feeling very confident that they will have the skills and talent they need to grow their organizations over the next three years, compared with 47% of those in the US who say the same. Most are concerned with recruiting and retaining skilled talent, with a sizable percentage of decision makers indicating this as the most important human resources challenge they face, ahead of concerns around compensation, adaptation to technology or workplace diversity.

These findings, explored in more depth in D2L’s latest whitepaper, Enabling Upskilling at Scale: Adapting to Meet the Needs of the Working Learner, echo other recent survey results about a noticeable skills shortage. For instance, eight in 10 (81%) of Canadian executives polled by CERIC in late 2021 said finding skilled workers is difficult – and more than half of them attributed that challenge to finding people with the right skillset.

D2L’s research findings reinforce that there is a fundamental misalignment between what SME employers need (that is, skilled employees) and what they get with their current training and development strategies.

More from Careering

Canada’s essential yet overqualified immigrant workforce
Values are the antidote to the ‘Great Careers Disconnect’
How to lead the career development revolution

The disconnect

With smaller budgets, many SMEs struggle to create and deliver robust, broad training programs in-house. An alternative is to offer supports for their employees to take off-the-job training, but upskilling is not happening on the scale it needs to be.

Only 34% of SMEs in both Canada and the US provide financial support or time off for training delivered by external providers. Among the employers that offer it, Canadian SME training budgets are notably smaller compared to their US counterparts. Canadian SMEs are also less likely to hire internally for new positions. When they were asked to pinpoint the biggest barriers preventing them from investing further, SME decision makers said that internal training or on-the-job learning was sufficient.

“… there is a fundamental misalignment between what SME employers need (that is, skilled employees) and what they get with their current training and development strategies.”

On the other side of this equation are employees, who broadly said they are eager to keep learning. D2L’s research found that 72% of employees are interested in professional development outside of work. They said they see these opportunities primarily as means to build skills, rather than as a way to increase their salary or to qualify for a job promotion. But access clearly remains a problem. Over half of Canadian employees of SMEs surveyed said they hadn’t taken on any professional development over the past 12 months. The biggest barrier – reported by 43% of Canadian employees – was the financial cost of training.

Employers need options to help their employees upskill and grow. Employees want to continue their professional development and learn new things. Cost is a barrier for both. What options does this leave SMEs for facilitating professional development that is both an employer and employee need?

The opportunity

Continued upskilling for employees, which helps enable better recruitment and retention in SMEs, is a shared responsibility between employers, government and higher-education institutions in North America.

Employers must first recognize the problem at hand and urgently consider how they will invest in skills development for their workforce. With the speed of technological change, employers can’t reasonably predict all the skills they will need years in advance. That’s why they need to build processes that will support continuous upskilling and create pipelines of talent for jobs that may not exist. Providing financial support and time off for employees is an essential first-order investment for companies of all sizes. Technology can be used to provide quick and easy access to learning that aligns with their company or industry needs, leveraging higher education and industry associations to provide training.

Career development practitioners can also play a key role by serving as intermediaries between students or jobseekers and employers. Those liaising with employers can advocate for the development of career management supports for employees, as well as partner with businesses to provide resources or training for staff career development. Career practitioners working in post-secondary can also encourage employers to engage with students by offering value-added opportunities such as career education programming.

For their part, higher-education institutions must re-think how they define a learner to better serve working adults in need of high-quality skills training on flexible and more personalized schedules and timelines. They must think beyond credit hours and imagine new programs and partnerships with employers, associations and unions to help make continuous upskilling more accessible.

Clearly, there is also a role for government, which must reconsider its funding offerings for SMEs to increase general awareness and eligibility for training and skills development. Government must also uplift the voices of SMEs in consultations and consider taxable incentives to encourage employers to invest in training funds. Finally, government can also play a critical unifying role, bringing stakeholders together and helping shape a shared vision for workforce development that ensures nobody gets left behind.

Malika Asthana is the Manager for Strategy and Public Affairs for D2L. Asthana leads the development of strategic thought leadership, policy submissions and proposals to support, expand and improve learning opportunities for all students in Canada. She is passionate about making connections across disciplines and enjoys research at the intersection of policy spaces – from education and employment, to skills and economic development.

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Closeup of Canadian immigration formCareering

Canada’s essential yet overqualified immigrant workforce

June 14, 2022By
Addressing the entrenched issues around newcomer employment in Canada will require systems-level change

Yilmaz E. Dinc

author headshotOverqualification is a common and well-known problem for the immigrant workforce. But the pandemic shed a different light on the issue: the products and services that we consider essential are also provided by immigrants whose talent potential is underutilized.

Immigrant underemployment in Canada is what we at the Conference Board call a “wicked problem” that has been around for decades. Many newcomers in Canada, particularly those without Canadian qualifications and work experience, and those with a background in a regulated profession, face considerable difficulty in finding jobs that match their skillset. They often have to take low-income jobs that don’t use their full skillset just to make ends meet.

Underemployment affects immigrant careers even in the longer term – and nowhere is this effect more pronounced than in essential jobs. A study that we conducted at the Conference Board of Canada last year showed that immigrants are a critical part of the essential workforce, constituting close to one-third of all workers in sectors such as food manufacturing, truck transportation, and nursing and residential care. However, many are overqualified for their roles. For instance, 28% of newcomer transport truck drivers have bachelor’s degrees even though their job doesn’t require one, compared to only 1.6% of their counterparts born in Canada.

What this data tells us is that even though many immigrants are performing essential work, these are often not the right opportunities that build on their talent potential. This in turn limits their earnings and negatively affects their career trajectories. This impact is usually much more pronounced for racialized newcomer workers and newcomer women.

“Underemployment affects immigrant careers even in the longer term – and nowhere is this effect more pronounced than in essential jobs.” 

This phenomenon isn’t only applicable to newcomers. Among people on temporary visas, more than 20% of fish and seafood plant workers and over 30% of labourers in food and beverage processing are overqualified. As Canada welcomes more people with previous experience in Canada and grows its immigration targets, the overqualification question becomes even more prevalent.

The qualifications disconnect is not just an individual-level problem. Canada loses up to $50 billion every year due to employment and earning gaps between immigrants – including essential workers – and people born in Canada.

At the same time, this creates challenges for employers, who continue to report difficulties in talent attraction and retention. Employees who feel overqualified for their role will likely experience lower job satisfaction and be more likely to look for other jobs. It’s worth considering to what extent skills shortages would be addressed by better matching immigrant competencies with labour demand.

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Moving the needle on credential recognition

There are multiple drivers of why overqualification happens. Despite decades of consultations and efforts to improve credential recognition, it remains a complex, costly and time-consuming process for many regulated occupations. However, there are also promising steps being taken in the right direction.

The Government of Ontario has recently removed the Canadian experience barrier for many professions, including electricians, engineers and plumbers. This move will surely help newcomers with a background in these occupations find better-quality job opportunities. Other provinces will likely take note of the results and mirror a similar approach.

However, Ontario’s recent changes did not include health-care occupations, which remain the thorniest part of the problem. Our report found that nurse aides, orderlies and patient support associates were the occupations with the highest degree of overqualification (surpassing farm workers, truck drivers and food manufacturing workers).

The data indicates that licensing internationally educated health professionals should be a government priority at both federal and provincial levels. A March 2022 Toronto Metropolitan University policy brief, for instance, highlighted the need for a “Health Human Resources Strategy” in Ontario that would address the gaps in licensing, seeking alternatives to Canadian experience as well as boosting access to permanent residency.

Tackling bias

The problem, however, does not end with formal credential recognition. Some occupations require further practice but have additional limitations, such as fewer residency spots for internationally educated doctors.

Bias is also an issue. Some employers discount the value of work experience and qualifications obtained abroad. Discrimination against international degrees and experiences, combined with race, gender and ethnicity biases, push many newcomers into difficult essential jobs that people born in Canada don’t want to work in. Groups such as racialized newcomer women end up facing the most complex challenges when it comes to securing quality employment.

The way forward

So, how do we address the overqualification challenge? It won’t be solved overnight, as systems-level change involving multiple actors will take time. In addition to government actions to expedite licensing, employers need to build more inclusive workplaces that help immigrants find jobs matching their skill level and address bias and discrimination.

Employers will also need support from the government, non-profit and settlement sectors to assess foreign work experience and qualifications more effectively and objectively. This is particularly true for smaller businesses.

For many immigrants already underemployed within the system, forming and strengthening upward and cross-sector mobility is critical. That needs to include identifying and building on their transferable skills to help them transition into more skills-commensurate opportunities. Tools such as OpportuNext could help chart those pathways. Reskilling and upskilling might be needed for immigrants whose skillsets are no longer up to date.

As the government and employers work on addressing systems-level challenges, it will be up to settlement and career development practitioners to support overqualified immigrants in pursuing more fitting employment opportunities. This could include identifying sectors with growing employment prospects and helping immigrant workers to assess and rethink their skillsets accordingly. Immigrants may also need guidance on how to diversify their job search as well as when to pursue further qualifications and training to secure skills-commensurate employment.

The pandemic has shown us that Canada relies significantly on immigrants to do the essential jobs, but many newcomers shouldn’t be in these jobs to begin with. We cannot afford to ignore the overqualification challenge if we want to make immigration work better for everyone.

Yilmaz E. Dinc, PhD, is a Senior Research Associate for the Immigration Knowledge Area at The Conference Board of Canada. Dinc brings a decade of experience in applied research, along with his passion for inclusion, to drive thought leadership on immigration. Previously, he worked as Research and Evaluation Manager at the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council and in the global private-sector hub of the United Nations Development Programme.

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How to lead the career development revolution

June 14, 2022By
We need a national strategy on career development in Canada to capitalize on social shifts and respond to labour market needs

Lisa Taylor and Taryn Blanchard

author headshotsIt’s an exciting time in Canada’s career development sector. Individual actors, organizations and projects are coming together. Awareness, expertise and commitment are coalescing. Focus is shifting from isolated activities to ambitious initiatives that emphasize co-ordination, amplify impact and prepare the sector for what comes next: a catalyst that ignites revolutionary change.

Challenge Factory and others are calling for a national strategy on career development in Canada. This call is urgent and essential if we want Canada to capitalize on social and economic shifts, to respond to labour market and employment needs and to seize on powerful opportunities for change when they arise.

Revolutions feel chaotic and disordered, but they also follow predictable patterns (Figure 1). In this article, we explore how the career development sector can shape its future in revolutionary times.

Illustration showing phases of revolutions: Early Phase (Tech, Trends, Thought Leaders); then, Emergent Shift (Work force, Work place); then, Urgent Change (Catalyst)
Figure 1: Revolutions follow patterns, from The Talent Revolution: Longevity and the Future of Work, Taylor and Lebo, p. 24.
Signs of a career development revolution: Early phase

In quiet discussions among practitioners, it’s well known that the career development sector is undergoing significant disruption. COVID-19, social justice awareness, advancement in technologies and the role of post-secondary institutions in linking learning and work are all causing cracks in traditional careers work.

The early phase of revolutionary change is marked not only by disruption, but also by an abundance of innovation, study and analysis. Over time, these separate activities come to align in a variety of ways that push sectors and societies forward. Let’s take a look at four early phase activities.

“The early phase of revolutionary change is marked not only by disruption, but also by an abundance of innovation, study and analysis.”

International benchmarking: In February, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) released a major report on the state of adult career guidance in Canada that details the need to strengthen co-ordination of careers policy across the country, encourage greater and more inclusive use of adult career services and promote high-quality service provision.

Book cover for Retain and GainDialogue and storytelling: Challenge Factory and CERIC are collaborating on a new Careers and Canadians webinar series that also focuses on the intersection of career development and public policy. Based on Retain and Gain: Career Management for the Public Sector, this series examines the personal career stories of senior policy leaders and where opportunity lies for a careers lens to inform policy development.

Professionalization: The Canadian Career Development Foundation (CCDF) is co-ordinating inclusive, sector-wide collaborative activities, including the renewal of practitioner standards and guidelines, the creation of a comprehensive competency model and the exploration of the feasibility of a professional institute.

Sector mapping: Efforts are under way to map the career development sector, including a project by CERIC and another from the Labour Market Information Council and Future Skills Centre. These projects aim to better understand career service providers across Canada, types of services being provided, client groups being served and the impact of these services.

These types of activities and information sources are important for building an evidence base that can be used to make informed decisions. To properly position the sector for revolutionary change, however, activities that look to learn from the past and understand the present will have a greater impact if they are also combined with activities that focus on anticipating what futures might be possible.

Recommendation: Stakeholders leading separate activities should recognize that our collective future is tied to working together. This is when true transformation will become possible. They should also start investing in future-focused tools and approaches, in the same way that they have invested in tools and approaches that research the past and present.

Getting organized: Emergent shift

In the second stage of revolutionary change, what we call the emergent shift, the importance of collective effort receives buy-in and everyone can see that a big moment is coming ­– but the conditions are not yet perfect for the catalyst that will set the full-scale revolution in motion. How do we ensure the sector is prepared to meet that big moment when it arrives?

Former Saskatchewan Deputy Minister Alastair MacFadden, the first guest in CERIC’s Careers and Canadians webinar series, notes that much of the sector is focused on optimizing the individual services provided to clients within current policy constraints. This includes advocating for better supports to reduce unemployment and faster access to training to fill skills gaps that are affecting the economy.

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“We’ll really start to make headway when we flip our focus,” MacFadden says. “We need to develop programs and policy with a view to what they mean for individual careers. Rather than investing in training programs for displaced oil workers, for example, we need to create energy policy that has meaningful employment embedded within it as a key priority.”

Recommendation: The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) should be taken up as an organizing framework for the sector’s future-focused planning. We already see this happening in pockets and on an ad hoc basis. Full adoption will allow us to draw together isolated activities and align our workstreams in service of broader needs and opportunities, such as the green economy, social justice and global migration patterns.

Preparing for the catalyst: urgent change

We don’t yet know which spark will be the catalyst that truly starts the revolution in career development across Canada. But once that catalyst occurs, it will activate urgent change, the third stage in the revolutionary cycle, and we will be able to move forward into whatever the new world is going to be – if we don’t let the uncertainty of upheaval stop us.

Recommendation: Create a national strategy on career development that is realistic in its implementation and wildly aspirational in its intent and impact. A national strategy must change how we perceive ourselves, our work and our impact, while demonstrating strong ties to other areas of social progress (the SDGs). Working toward this national strategy will position and prepare us to recognize the catalyst moment, when it comes, and shape a future that benefits Canadians and the sector.

Developing a national strategy (on anything) is a monumental task in Canada’s federated, diverse environment. Yet there are tools and methods to bring everyone to the table, to set achievable expectations and to ride the wave of revolutionary change. Right now, we would start by asking a few deceptively simple questions:

  1. What are the historical drivers of change in the sector?
  2. What emerging issues are we excited, concerned or confused about?
  3. If we continue as we are, what are a few likely scenarios that might occur (given what we know about current and future trends related to employment, labour, productivity, wellness and competitiveness)?
  4. If we had a national strategy in place, what additional scenarios might emerge?
  5. Which of the scenarios outlined in questions 3 and 4 are worth exploring in more detail?

Knowing how to ask better questions and what to do with the responses is a critical skill. Done well, this effort will challenge us all to zoom out from our work today, identify the collective future we want and see that future so clearly we can’t help but take steps to make it happen.

It’s time for the career development sector to forge a path to better work, employment, engagement, well-being, prosperity and productivity for all. Blazing new trails is challenging work. But such is the nature of revolutionary change – and Challenge Factory is energized by the potential. Let’s get to work!

Lisa Taylor is a sought-after expert, speaker and columnist on today’s changing world of work. She is the President of Challenge Factory, a full member of the Association of Professional Futurists, an associate at the National Institute on Ageing, and co-author of The Talent Revolution: Longevity and the Future of Work.

Taryn Blanchard is the head of research at Challenge Factory and holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto.

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