Joint College Academic Upgrading, Job Connect Apprenticeship Training Conference - June 2007

By Linda Franklin, President and CEO
June 6, 2007

Good morning.

I’m delighted to have this opportunity to speak to you this morning on behalf of Colleges Ontario. After four months as President and being so new to the education sector, I can tell you that one of my greatest achievements to date is that I’ve learned about half of the acronyms in the college system so that I can participate in discussions with some measure of understanding…

Speaking of which, I regret that I was unable to join you earlier for the conference as I’ve been in CoP meetings these past two days.

However, it is better late than never, as they say, and I do want to share with you a little bit about what your association – Colleges Ontario – has been doing to advance the college system and our issues in recent months.

First, let me commend you for taking the time to participate in this event, which is an important way to strengthen and improve on the programs and services colleges offer. I know the organizers have put together a rich and full program that will result in the exchange of a lot of good ideas and valuable information.

* * *

Colleges Ontario continues to pursue a core set of priorities in support of the system:

• We’re working to stand out against other sectors – especially health care and infrastructure – in order to secure our fair share of provincial and federal investments. New monies contained in the recent Ontario and federal budgets point to some success in this regard, but clearly more needs to be done on the funding side. The fact remains that Ontario ranks tenth of ten provinces on per student funding for colleges.
• That leads to a second priority, which is to convince opinion leaders and decision-makers that our fiscal challenges are far from over, despite the additional investments contained in the province’s Reaching Higher plan.
• The need to increase enrolment across the system has become a significant issue. The demographics are not in our favour – high school enrolment is dropping, and of those who graduate from high school, about half do not go on to postsecondary. At the same time, on the apprenticeship side, the colleges are facing competition from unions and other apprenticeship trainers. The other reality is that thousands of students choose the university route when in fact going to college would be the more appropriate choice. The need to attract more students to has prompted us to conduct research into the perceptions of high school students and the public about colleges. While great strides have been made, the data shows that many are still unaware of the value of a college education.
• The enrolment issue, which of course has huge funding implications, has led us to spearhead the development of a comprehensive, multi-year, system-wide marketing strategy to attract students to the college system and make the public more aware of the value of a college education. We’ve secured $1 million from the province for this initiative and are working with a team of college marketing directors to plan and develop the strategy.

* * *

A recent focus of ours has been to try and persuade the political parties to make a college education a key platform plank in their election campaigns this fall. We developed a series of proposals and ideas, including setting specific targets for things such as:

• Postsecondary participation rates;
• Adult literacy increases;
• New apprentices, with more businesses participating; and
• Increases in internationally-trained skilled workers.

We have urged the parties to commit to:

• Making Ontario a leader in the delivery of adult education;
• Increasing public awareness of and support for skills training;
• Leading all other provinces in transferability of credits among post secondary institutions; and
• Increase per student funding for colleges to at least the national average.

* * *

One of the challenges of any advocacy organization is to determine and understand its relevancy. We’ve been asking ourselves “Why do we matter to the people of Ontario, to our collective future as a province? What are Ontario’s economic and social challenges and how can we, as a system, help address them?

As producers of skilled workers, we looked closely at Ontario’s labour market and noted some stark realities:

• Youth unemployment is higher in Ontario than in any other province outside of the Maritimes.
• Wages and participation rates of unskilled workers continue to fall due to globalization and technological change. Adults with incomplete high school are only ¾ as likely to have a job as those with a college credential & most live close to the poverty line.
• Almost half of unemployed Ontarians have literacy scores below the level needed to cope with current skill demands for the economy.
• In 5 years there will be fewer young adults joining the workforce and Ontario workers will need continuous education and retraining to keep current and employable.
• By 2013, 70% of new jobs will require a post-secondary credential. Today, less than half of Canadians have postsecondary qualifications.

Clearly there is work to do. We have a serious problem with skills mismatches in Ontario and the time for complacency is over. The public and the politicians are concerned, but are not fully engaged in the issue. And that IS our collective challenge: moving from talk to action.

We need to work together with business and industry to persuade the public and governments that we have to act now, we can’t wait until we have been eclipsed by faster-moving competitors in the world economy.

Every successful employer that you know and that I know recognizes that people are his or her most valued resource.

It’s not rocket science: managers are looking for employees with the right education, skills, and attitudes, and they will continue to train them for maximum performance.

It means higher productivity, better customer service, workplace innovation, and most important, higher profits.

And they also know that if they become complacent about employee skills, it is only a matter of time before their competitors put them out of business.

Its not a big leap to conclude that Ontario – and Canada – can be prosperous only if it has world-beating labour market policies and programs.

Employers also know that the bar is quickly rising: technological change and globalization have increased their requirements for skilled workers. Canadian employers have almost 4 million more employees with postsecondary credentials than they had 15 years ago. But they have three quarters of a million FEWER employees without postsecondary credentials.

Even with this huge shift in hiring, many sectors face skill shortages – manufacturing, mining, construction, small business, financial services, transportation services, to name a few.

Investment in computers, communications equipment and software has grown an astounding 1500% in Ontario in two decades, and there’s no doubt technology has transformed the large majority of jobs during those two decades. It’s also led to an increase in skill requirements rather than a decrease.

Another fact to ponder:

• Half the jobs in the next 15 years will require the ability to use technology not yet invented.

The technological revolution also means new occupations are continuously emerging in most sectors. The pressure comes from higher engineering and production standards, e-commerce, communications and graphics. And it comes from rising social aspirations, such as better health care and environmental regulation.

The colleges have responded – despite serious funding challenges – to the changing demands of the labour market by introducing more than 200 new or substantially revised programs in the past three years. And more will be needed. Experts predict that there will be more advancement in technology in the next four to five decades than in the past 450 years.

Let’s talk about labour shortages. Alberta has given us a taste of our future. Within 5 years, the number of young adults joining Ontario’s workforce will be flat-lined.

Small and medium sized businesses will feel the pinch first because they hire most of the young workers. And industries with a lot of young workers, like accommodation & food services, retail, information, culture and recreation could be scrambling.

Our skills mismatch is affecting our economic growth and prosperity. Canada’s productivity is growing much slower than U.S. productivity, and Ontario is 9th in Canada.

And we are slipping on quality of life indicators as well: Canada, once first on the UN’s Human Development Index, has slipped to 6th place in 2006.

Not surprisingly, in a knowledge-based economy, low education is a major cause of poverty. According to the World Economic Forum, our scores on education and training are falling. On workplace learning, Canada is falling behind the US.

Ontarians without a high school education are much less likely to have a job as those who have completed a postsecondary credential. In fact, even when they are working, they are often in poverty.

And of course, skills mismatches contribute to poverty: in the last five years, the average earnings for employees in Ontario, adjusted for inflation, fell 2.5% - that’s a 9th place ranking among provinces.

Look at our global competitors. China is the world’s largest high tech exporter, selling five times the high tech products to the U.S. as Canada does. China is surpassing the U.S. as the world’s largest economy, while India becomes #3.

The World Bank says the effective global labour force has risen an astounding fourfold over the past two decades.

As global competition intensifies, it’s not just unskilled Canadians who should be worrying: What is most chilling is that the competition is quickly climbing the skill ladder. Developing countries now have 94 million post-secondary students – that’s 70% of the world’s total postsecondary enrolment. Compare that to fact I mentioned earlier: less than half of Ontario high school graduates go on to postsecondary.

As I also said earlier, we all know that a serious skills mismatch is both constraining our economy and contributing to poverty. Dozens of organizations have sounded the alarm bell, from the Conference Board of Canada to the Canadian Auto Workers. And yet, according to recent polls, only 7 per cent of people see this as the most important issue facing Ontario. It is a good start, but it is well below the totals for health or the environment.

The fact is: too many people don’t have the right skills for the jobs that are available. The public is only starting to get the message. We have a ton of work to do if the public is to see this as the most critical issue for governments to respond to.

I think the next step needs to be to form a broad-based coalition of organizations to address Canada’s skill mismatch. It would have two clear tasks:

• To raise the profile of the impact that skills mismatches are having on the economy and on poverty; and
• To press governments to implement effective strategies to ensure that our future labour force has the skills we need to compete in a tough world economy.

One of those strategies must surely be to bolster investment in colleges, giving them the resources to respond effectively to the ever-changing needs of the workplace. We cannot be truly effective leaders without a) adequate resources to provide the best education and training programs possible, and b) a seat at the table when governments are making policy decisions that affect the role and the future of the college system.

I hope that you – the deliverers of the programs and services that are preparing people for the world of work – will join me in beating the “job mismatch” drum, and urge anyone who will listen, especially the politicians you know, that it’s time to move from talk to action.

Thank you for listening. Enjoy the rest of your conference.

Source: Colleges Ontario
Photo: Courtesy of Wiki Commons Media