The European e-Competence Framework (e-CF) version 3.0 provides a reference of 40 competences as required and applied at the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) workplace, using a common language for competences, skills and capability levels that can be understood across Europe. As the first sector-specific implementation of the European Qualifications Framework (EQF), the e-CF was created for application by ICT service, user and supply companies, for managers and human resource (HR) departments, for education institutions and training bodies including higher education, for market watchers and policy makers, and other organisations in public and private sectors.

Dr. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt, professor of English at Linfield College, laments the downsizing of liberal arts and humanities programs and departments by college administrators bent on promoting more "job-oriented" disciplines.

This white paper is the outcome of a global consultative process initiated by the World Economic Forum’s Platform for Shaping the Future of the New Economy and Society to identify promising models of quality education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is the first output of the Forum’s Education 4.0 initiative, which aims to catalyse systems change by mobilizing a broad and innovative coalition of relevant stakeholders around new models, new standards and a new momentum for action to transform the future of education.Eight critical characteristics in learning content and experiences have been identified to define high-quality learning in the Fourth Industrial Revolution—“Education 4.0”: 1. Global citizenship skills: Include content that focuses on building awareness about the wider world, sustainability and playing an active role in the global community. 2. Innovation and creativity skills: Include content that fosters skills required for innovation, including complex problem-solving, analytical thinking, creativity and systems analysis. 3. Technology skills: Include content that is based on developing digital skills, including programming, digital responsibility and the use of technology. 4. Interpersonal skills: Include content that focuses on interpersonal emotional intelligence, including empathy, cooperation, negotiation, leadership and social awareness. 5. Personalized and self-paced learning: Move from a system where learning is standardized, to one based on the diverse individual needs of each learner, and flexible enough to enable each learner to progress at their own pace. 6. Accessible and inclusive learning: Move from a system where learning is confined to those with access to school buildings to one in which everyone has access to learning and is therefore inclusive. 7. Problem-based and collaborative learning: Move from process-based to project- and problem-based content delivery, requiring peer collaboration and more closely mirroring the future of work. 8. Lifelong and student-driven learning: Move from a system where learning and skilling decrease over one’s lifespan to one where everyone continuously improves on existing skills and acquires new ones based on their individual needs.

This article presents the results of a two-year exploratory study examining the issues facing urban Aboriginal persons with disabilities in Canada (Durst and Bluechardt, 2001). Due to the topic, this research crosses cultures and was approached in a culturally sensitive manner involving Aboriginal persons in all stages of its development, from initial planning through to dissemination. A triangulation of data sources was used, collecting data from a comprehensive literature review, including secondary data, focus groups or œtalking circles with Aboriginal persons with physical disabilities, and in-depth interviews with professional service providers

This paper provides advice to the Business Council of Canada on ways to sustain and develop Canada’s labour market information, widely known as LMI. Reliable and useful jobs data is essential to delivering a well-functioning labour market and, more generally, a strong Canadian economy. Recent work by the Business Council and other groups has underlined the wide range of workplace skills required to achieve these goals. In particular, businesses are increasingly looking for workers with multi-faceted competencies—not just technical knowledge, but also so-called “soft skills” such as collaboration and teamwork, problem-solving, relationship building and an openness to change. At its best, labour market information provides clear signals that guide the various players towards the most appropriate choices. It helps identify the skills that business needs, and how they can be developed. LMI is critical in matching workers with jobs (and vice versa), and highlighting gaps between the skills that are available and those in need. The entire labour market reaps these benefits: 1. Students know what education and training to pursue and to what extent their educational credentials will be measured, accredited and transferable. 2. Educators know what programs best contribute to the economy. In that way, they can better understand what to teach, and how to ensure their graduates’ success in the job market. 3. Workers better know where the jobs are and what they require. 4. Immigrants know the opportunities that await them, and the skills they need. 5. Businesses know what skills are available in the workforce and what gaps need to be filled. Proper information helps inform employers and workers of the potential pay-offs of training. 6. Governments know which training programs are needed to fill skills gaps. Better program evaluations help policymakers allocate training resources to obtain the most “bang for the buck”. In this way, employers find workers’ skills more closely aligned to their needs, helping them fill job vacancies, bringing down unemployment, and boosting productivity and output. Canada has no shortage of labour market information. However, the data is fragmented, often hard to access and has many gaps, such as developments in the workplace, the balance of labour demand and supply in local markets, and the longer-term experience of college and university graduates in the labour market, to name just a few.

This paper provides advice to the Business Council of Canada on ways to sustain and develop Canada’s labour market information, widely known as LMI. Reliable and useful jobs data is essential to delivering a well-functioning labour market and, more generally, a strong Canadian economy. Recent work by the Business Council and other groups has underlined the wide range of workplace skills required to achieve these goals. In particular, businesses are increasingly looking for workers with multi-faceted competencies—not just technical knowledge, but also so-called “soft skills” such as collaboration and teamwork, problem-solving, relationship building and an openness to change. At its best, labour market information provides clear signals that guide the various players towards the most appropriate choices. It helps identify the skills that business needs, and how they can be developed. LMI is critical in matching workers with jobs (and vice versa), and highlighting gaps between the skills that are available and those in need. The entire labour market reaps these benefits: 1. Students know what education and training to pursue and to what extent their educational credentials will be measured, accredited and transferable. 2. Educators know what programs best contribute to the economy. In that way, they can better understand what to teach, and how to ensure their graduates’ success in the job market. 3. Workers better know where the jobs are and what they require. 4. Immigrants know the opportunities that await them, and the skills they need. 5. Businesses know what skills are available in the workforce and what gaps need to be filled. Proper information helps inform employers and workers of the potential pay-offs of training. 6. Governments know which training programs are needed to fill skills gaps. Better program evaluations help policymakers allocate training resources to obtain the most “bang for the buck”. In this way, employers find workers’ skills more closely aligned to their needs, helping them fill job vacancies, bringing down unemployment, and boosting productivity and output. Canada has no shortage of labour market information. However, the data is fragmented, often hard to access and has many gaps, such as developments in the workplace, the balance of labour demand and supply in local markets, and the longer-term experience of college and university graduates in the labour market, to name just a few.

Canada's Economic Action Plan 2013 recognizes that training is not sufficiently aligned to the skills employers need or to the jobs available, resulting in a skills mismatch that leads to higher unemployment and slower economic growth. Because the Canadian-born work force is aging, baby boomers are retiring, and the number of young workers entering the work force is declining, there is also a growing skills and labour shortage amidst global competition for talent (Grant, 2013; CIC, 2009; Industry Canada & HRSDC, 2008). As skilled Canadian-born workers are becoming increasingly difficult to find, immigrants will play a more significant role in Canada's labour force (Canadian Chamber of Commerce, 2009). Statistics Canada (2008) research indicates that before the middle of the next decade, almost all labour force growth will come from immigration. Forthcoming revisions to the federal selection system for skilled workers (the proposed Expression of Interest (EOI) system) call for an increased role for employers, in part, to facilitate a better match between skilled immigrants and the labour market. Thismodernized' system will be implemented early in 2015. The federal and provincial governments, the community of employers, and immigrant service providers all have roles to play in increasing employers' capacity to recruit, hire and settle immigrants. The federal government's role is critical for employers in respect of making decisions on who is admitted to Canada, including immigrants, temporary foreign workers and foreign students. Thus, federal decisions affect employers' hiring practices in their workplaces and ability to attract, retain and integrate newcomers (IECBC, 2012). As key actors in the immigration system, employers are actively encouraged to hire newcomers in Canada. Yet newcomers face challenges with the lack of recognition of their foreign education and work credentials, which impacts labour market integration. This hard reality is forcing a re-examination of existing policies with a view to achieving earlier labour market integration, including policies aimed at retaining skilled newcomers already in the country. The goal of the knowledge synthesis project is to describe the state of knowledge on the role of employers and employer organizations in bridging newcomers' absorption and integration. The knowledge synthesis project considers the following questions: ï‚· What is the impact of immigration policies on employer behaviour and response to policy measures and, by extension, on labour supply and skills development uptake? ï‚· What is the œvalue proposition for hiring newcomers from employers' perspective? ï‚· How could employers be motivated to play a greater role in social and economic integration, and what strategies might provide them with the tools and resources to do so? ï‚· What is the potential contribution that settlement agencies can make to employers in shaping behavior and assistance to conduct settlement activities? In answering these questions, the project sought to: 1) Identify employer interests and perspectives in bridging gaps between labour market demand for skills and the supply of skills using different immigrant flows to accelerate labour market absorption; 2) Identify the most promising policies and practices, so as to better discern and meet future skills needs; and 3) Compile a knowledge synthesissummary' to inform dialogue between government policy-makers, education and training institutions, researchers, stakeholders, and employers.

In recent years, an increasing amount of attention has been placed in the media around the school to work transition journey of post-secondary students, youth unemployment and underemployment, skills disconnects and mismatches, and the career prospects of graduating students. This attention rarely examines the role of the institutional eco-system or its career service provisions in relation to job or career outcomes. This national CERIC project will establish the importance that publicly funded universities and colleges place on the provision of career development services to their students and highlight particularly impressive models of career service provision across the country. This project will be of interest to career services leadership and colleagues aspiring to leadership positions, as well as university and college senior administrators who wish to ensure high quality and relevant career services .Project objectives: To understand the landscape of career service models across Canada To examine the level of institutional commitment to the provision of career services to its student

The focus of this study is on the potential causes of skill mismatch, the extent of skill mismatch, the socio- demographic make-up of skill mismatch, and the consequences of skill mismatch in terms of earnings as well as employer sponsored adult education/training. A distinction is made between skill mismatch and education mismatch. The analysis is based on the 2003-2007 Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey (ALLS) - a dataset similar to the one that is forthcoming from the Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) in 2013. These studies contain direct measures of key foundation skills as well as measures of the use of certain generic skills at work which allow for a direct measure of skill mismatch. The analysis points to the complex ways in which mismatch is generated and the need for an accurate and up to date measure of mismatch, one that reflects the possibilities for skill gain and skill loss over the lifespan, and reflects differences in the quality of qualifications. Two key findings stand out. First, including supply and demand characteristics in an earnings function reveals that labour demand characteristics are more important than labour supply characteristics in explaining earnings differentials. In other words, skills matter for earnings but only if they are required by the job. This has direct implications for understanding better the causes of mismatch on earnings. Second, the skill content of jobs seems to be an even stronger determinant of participation in employer supported adult education/training than educational attainment or literacy proficiency. The influence of demand characteristics thus tends to outweigh the influence of supply characteristics when employers make the decision to support adult education/training. Addressing mismatch thus requires a careful consideration of both the demand and supply sides of the labour market, so as to understand better the variety of factors which may have a negative impact on the effectiveness of skill formation, skill maintenance, and also skill use.