Innovation Projects
We’re making a $37 million investment into innovative and community-based programs to find solutions to Canada’s changing workforce
With a strong focus on how we can provide meaningful action for our community’s disadvantaged and underrepresented groups, the Future Skills Centre is investing in 30 new projects to fill employers’ skills gaps and help workers gain in-demand skills in this post-pandemic period.
This $37-million investment into community-based programs focuses on the needs of diverse Canadian workers and employers by exploring innovative approaches to training and upskilling for emerging and in-demand skills.
These 30 projects span all regions of the country and are the result of consultations with stakeholders across Canada’s skills ecosystem. They were selected after an extensive review of hundreds of submissions to a call for proposals we established last year.
With a strong focus on how we can provide meaningful action for Canada’s disadvantaged and underrepresented groups, the projects cover four major themes.
They range from leveraging people and AI technology, to training, reskilling, and adapting within industries facing chronic skills shortages, to radical new approaches to training and learning in order to build capacity to creating an inclusive workforce for the future by not leaving anyone behind. By applying a rigorous evaluation strategy to all our projects, the Future Skills Centre is keen to work with these partners to help every Canadian succeed in a changing workplace.
Funding for Innovation Projects
Various sectors including hospitality, health care and technology are facing significant demand for workers with new skills. This call looks at all industries with challenges to mitigate, and also looks for new opportunities that can be further leveraged, accelerating skills training to help many navigate an evolving job market.
Featured Projects
Supporting Mid-Career Workers in Retail and Meat Processing
A Young, Northern Workforce Enters the World of ICT
Rapid Response in Times of Disruption: Prototyping a case study in the hard-hit hospitality sector
Evaluation Strategy
We focus on generating high-quality evidence about innovation projects to help practitioners and policy makers understand how they can learn, improve, and maximize their impact.
Our approach to evaluation combines a systematic approach to measuring outcomes across innovation projects, with the flexibility to customize designs to the purpose, context, and goals of each project.
We work closely with innovation project partners to ensure we are measuring what matters most – ensuring that findings not only contribute to a broader evidence base on what works, but also inform the day-to-practices and decision-making of our partners.