The job losses associated with the COVID-19 crisis highlight the need for Canada to prepare for unexpected shocks to the labour market and develop a workforce with skills that will be prized across a range of industries, futurists and economists say.
The job losses associated with the COVID-19 crisis highlight the need for Canada to prepare for unexpected shocks to the labour market and develop a workforce with skills that will be prized across a range of industries, futurists and economists say.
More than three million Canadians lost their jobs in March and April as public health restrictions shut down the economy, bringing about what Statistics Canada has said is the most rapid employment decline in the country’s history. The losses were staggering given Canada added 245,000 jobs in the 12 months ending in February, a robust period of job opportunity that saw record low unemployment.
That sudden reversal of fortune shows that preparing Canadians for an unpredictable future work landscape has to be a priority, said the authors of a new report out Friday.
Ahead by a Decade is the final forecast to come out of an initiative called Employment in 2030, the result of an 18-month research and analysis project by the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship, a non-partisan policy institute housed at Toronto’s Ryerson University.
I think this will help us prepare for some level of uncertainty and for future employment that will shift from familiar territory.– Steven Tobin
The research — done using a combination of strategic forecasting, artificial intelligence and expert panels held across the country — was conducted prior to the pandemic. But its lessons about building a resilient workforce are only more relevant now, said Sarah Doyle, the institute’s director of policy and research.
“Looking ahead to what jobs might exist on the other side of this crisis, how skill demand might be shifting, is more important now than ever to better prepare workers — who are contending with the job loss in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic — for future employment,” said Doyle.
The report says one-third of Canadian workers are in occupations with “a high probability of change.” It says policy responses — such as retraining programs and adapted school curricula — are needed now to increase resilience across Canada’s workforce.
Expecting the unexpected
Economist Steven Tobin, executive director of the Ottawa-based Labour Market Information Council, said the crisis shows Canada needs to face the future of work with more objective data and planning than we’ve had in the past.
“I think this will help us prepare for some level of uncertainty and for future employment that will shift from familiar territory,” said Tobin, who served as an advisory committee member for Employment in 2030 and is familiar with the report.
“I don’t think it’s a reasonable expectation that we get the direction or the magnitude of the shock correct, but by doing many more assumptions and scenarios, we can position ourselves to think, understand and potentially better respond.”
The unprecedented nature of the COVID crisis makes it hard to draw insights from history, he said. But the 2008-2009 financial crisis may be helping to inform policy now, namely that government moved swiftly to help in both cases — this time to assist individuals rather than financial institutions.
“When I think about 2008-2009, obviously one big mechanism for promoting recovery was around infrastructure investment,” said Tobin. “But we need to be mindful that many of the people who have lost their jobs in the past few months in Canada might not be in a position to benefit from infrastructure-related jobs.”
For example, people who lost jobs in hospitality and tourism, hard hit by the crisis, may not have an easy transition to building bridges or subway tunnels, he said.
5 foundational skills
The potential difficulty of making such a transition underscores the value of five foundational skills identified in the report that are expected to help workers remain resilient as the labour market evolves.
Lead author Diana Rivera said the research digs into the skill composition of occupations projected to grow in their share of employment by 2030.
Three are social skills and two are cognitive abilities.
Service orientation refers to being the kind of worker who actively looks for ways to help others, whether a client or a colleague. “So of course, we see that a lot in the service secto