In the current era of urgently accelerated self-reliance, Canada is intent on building things: more roads, pipelines, homes and large infrastructure projects. To do so requires co-ordinated government and private investments in critical drivers such as technology and materials, but also — critically — in people.
There are significant skill gaps and talent shortages across Canada, and we don’t currently have the workforce to meet our national ambitions. We know that part of the solution lies in skills development and training, but it’s also going to require the tricky work of co-ordinating the many moving parts in a complex skills development universe — pulling levers here, aligning actors there — and a focus on long-term achievement rather than short-term relief.
Since its launch seven years ago, the Future Skills Centre (FSC) — a pan-Canadian leader in the skills and workforce development space — has invested in more than 425 pilot and research projects. Its aim: a deeper understanding of the country’s shifting skills requirements and how to achieve closer alignment between labour supply and demand.
Recently, FSC partnered with the global research and innovation consultancy Behavioural Insights Team to analyze nearly 900 project proposals received in response to multiple funding calls in 2024. Collectively, these proposals offer a snapshot of how the sector defines problems, what solutions it gravitates toward, and where system change runs into roadblocks.
Skills gaps reflect a system problem, not just a training problem
Two patterns stand out.
First, organizations want to address skills gaps focusing on equity, technology and sector-specific issues, particularly in areas like AI adoption, the green economy, health care and the skilled trades. These priorities often reflect Canada’s most pressing needs, however many proposals tended to view technology — especially AI — as a magic wand for transforming Canada’s pool of skills.
What was not proposed? Few sought to tackle issues that affect their own organizations or target populations, but which aren’t easily addressed in the limited timeline of a proposed project. And few if any sought to change their management practices, improve navigation in a disjointed skills ecosystem or address critical (but less cool or marketable) foundational skills like literacy or numeracy.
The proposals also revealed a gap between ambition and implementation. More systemic, transformative ideas — new models of skills assessment, sectoral co-ordination or labour market infrastructure — often lacked realistic pathways to sustain initiatives beyond the funding period. Organizations also struggled to articulate how interventions would resonate with public funders, gravitating instead to easily-understood metrics such as number of people trained.
Meanwhile, proposals designed for rapid implementation tended to favour familiar program models that are easier to deliver but unlikely to modernize system dynamics. Some of these tensions are undoubtedly tied to limitations under the funding calls — for instance, projects less than a year in duration — but nevertheless few submissions proposed a first step towards a longer, more systemic initiative. Instead, most proposals favoured incremental activities that could be accomplished within the funding timeline, with metrics of success hyper-focused on short-term results.
Why most skills initiatives fall short of real change
These findings reinforce a critical truism: Real change takes both intentional design and commitment. It requires great ideas, thinking that embraces both big picture and fine details, sufficient time and investment, and the license to tackle complex problems.
This has been seen in FSC’s own experience. Projects with the strongest evidence, influence and scale are not always the ones that moved directly from idea to impact. FSC has found that high-impact projects have benefited from strong leadership, sufficient time, and data and evaluation support that promotes reflection, iteration and adaptation.
Big challenges are rarely solved easily and without setbacks. For example, in one project FSC worked with SkillPlan – a training organization for the skilled trades – to expand recruitment of under-represented groups into the construction trades. This herculean effort involved working with dozens of building trades organizations in every province, each with their own recruitment processes, regulations and relationships.
As with many effective initiatives, the journey was a lot bumpier than it seemed from the outside. But nearly five years later, the project has resulted in tens of thousands of people considering the skilled trades as a viable career pathway.
Improving the skills ecosystem requires managing setbacks and adaptations. Achieving clearer impacts, stable models for creating change, and solutions to workforce challenges is not simple. Those who succeeded often cited the supports provided by FSC — technical assistance, research and evaluation, knowledge mobilization, and investment dollars — as critical to success. Regrettably, there are simply too few such partners in Canada’s skills ecosystem.
Canada needs stronger intermediaries to connect workers and employers
Also critical to system transformations are intermediaries — organizations that provide the crucial interface between supply-side actors (training providers, universities, colleges) and demand-side actors (employers, unions, sectoral associations). Good intermediaries broker the incentives that each labour market body responds to, mobilizing evidence, connecting parties across silos and supporting implementers — all while keeping larger goals in sight.
Unfortunately, intermediaries are also rare in Canada, as most skills-development funding goes directly to organizations that deliver training (with varying degrees of employer engagement) rather than to modernizing the skills development dynamic of labour/market co-ordination.
Why Canada’s nation-building moment demands a skills revolution
For example, FSC funded a Calgary Economic Development retraining initiative to help midcareer workers move into the labour-hungry technology sector. As an intermediary, Calgary Economic Development essentially functioned as the broker of labour between demand (employers) and supply (training institutions). But because our skills systems have traditionally prioritized implementation over co-ordination, there has been little incentive for intermediaries to emphasize updating the sector-centric or regional workforce planning that Canada needs.
Fortunately, attitudes are evolving. Increasingly there are signs of awareness that large-scale coordination and collaboration will be essential to ensuring that Canada has the right skills, in the right place, at the right time. Programs like the federal government’s Workforce Alliances and the Sectoral Workforce Investment Fund are good examples of that changing vision.
Throughout recent engagements, FSC has heard that success for Workforce Alliances will depend on proactive, cross-industry co-ordination to transition Canada’s labour force from declining sectors into emerging areas of high demand. Rather than viewing labour in isolation, these alliances must develop solutions that facilitate both occupational and geographic mobility, ensuring that workers can transition into industries of the future.
These goals cannot be met with short-term, obsolete training parameters or stand-alone programs. Instead, the Workforce Alliances must work to define a contemporary connective tissue between labour supply and demand that will adapt to supporting both workers and employers in years to come.
Faced with mounting pressure to build faster and more equitably, Canada needs to emphasize long-term strategies and investments in skills and training, and increased support for the intermediaries who ensure the important link of synchronizing actors in order to achieve modern goals.
