The education and skills survey 2009 provides authoritative information on employers’ views of education and skills issues. It is being published at a time when business is facing tough economic conditions, but the benefits of investing in skills remain undiminished. The survey covers the full range of issues, including employer and employee commitment to training, basic skills, science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM), and business links with school and universities.

To meet these challenges, it is necessary to update and improve Canada's immigration policies. The Government of Canada should take four specific actions to boost economic growth and prosperity for all Canadians:  Annual 1. Increase permanent economic immigration from 300 000 to 450 000 people over five years (which will mean an increase of about 75 000 principal applicants and 75 000 of their relatives) to expand growth of the workforce and to counter the drag caused by the slower growth of the population and its aging.  2. Facilitating the entry of experienced talent and specialized streamlining permanent entry and temporary programs to make them faster and less costly for employers, which help give innovative companies and high growth capacity and skills management they need to expand their business and compete globally.  3. Rethinking assignments Express Entry points to make eligible a greater number of foreign students who conduct their studies in Canada for permanent residence to enable companies to tap into a young and educated talent pool that is already integrated.   4. Improve national accreditation standards to create conditions that will allow all immigrants to Canada to realize their economic potential for the benefit of all Canadians.  These recommendations, although they will reduce the current dragged on growth resulting from the aging population and specialized talent gaps, form only part of the solution. For immigration compensates fully the implications of this impending economic pressure for Canada, the annual permanent economic immigration to almost double from its current level of about 300,000 per year - which is increasing much more drastic than the 50% increase recommended in this document3. Moreover, immigration can not and should not solve all the talent shortages. Fast-growing companies may have no other alternative, given the immediacy of their talent needs, but longer-term governments and employers should ensure that Canadian training and education programs are responsive to the emerging needs of the labor market. [googletranslate_en]

In the fall of 2015, Ontario appointed the five members of the Expert Committee of the Prime Minister for the development of a highly skilled labor (the "Committee"): President Sean Conway and members Carol Campbell, Ph. D., Robert Hardt, Alison Loat and Pradeep Sood. (See Appendix E:. Biographies of Committee Members) Committee members were selected based on their professional experience, knowledge of the business environment, their relationships with various stakeholder groups and their understanding of employers, the world of education and the public sector, as well as issues affecting the labor market. The Committee was mandated to develop an integrated strategy to help the current and future workforce in the province to adapt to the demands of a knowledge economy focused on technology, establishing a bridge between the media skills development, education and training. [googletranslate_en]

A recent study suggests Canadians are worried about technological change and how it will change work. Governments must acknowledge this anxiety.

This paper reports on the results of a global field study conducted in 2014 and 2015 amongst leading manufacturers from a wide range of industries. It provides insights about managerial practice surrounding production sourcing as well as the factors driving these decisions. Exploratory factor analysis and multiple logistic regression models using the response data generate the following seven key findings: (1) Companies are currently restructuring their global production footprints. (2) The majority of firms engage in offshoring. Reshoring is indeed occurring but not largely for corrective reasons. (3) North America may be at the cusp of a manufacturing renaissance, but not because of reshoring. (4) China is still the most attractive source for production, followed by developing economies in Eastern Europe and Southern Asia. (5) The decline of manufacturing in developed economies, i.e., Western Europe and Japan, continues. (6) Labor cost is no longer the driving force in manufacturing location decisions. Instead, firms make complex trade-offs among a variety of factors. (7) Firms localize production in developed economies and use developing economies as production hubs.

In this report, we propose 21 new jobs that will emerge over the next 10 years and will become cornerstones of the future of work. In producing this report, we imagined hundreds of jobs that could emerge within the major macroeconomic, political, demographic, societal, cultural, business and technology trends observable today, e.g., growing populations, aging populations, populism, environmentalism, migration, automation, arbitrage, quantum physics, AI, biotechnology, space exploration, cybersecurity, virtual reality. Among the jobs we considered, some seemed further out on the horizon and are not covered here: carbon farmers, 3-D printing engineers, avatar designers, cryptocurrency arbitrageurs, drone jockeys, human organ developers, teachers of English as a foreign language for robots, robot spa owners, algae farmers, autonomous fleet valets, Snapchat addiction therapists, urban vertical farmers and Hyperloop construction managers. These are jobs that younger generations may do in the further off future. Others that we considered are somewhat niche forms of employment – e.g., tattoo removal artist or e-gaming sportsman – that will employ only hundreds of people. Those jobs, while interesting, are not covered here. Similarly, jobs that are already well understood and well developed, and which are set to boom in the short-term future – e.g., cybersecurity developer, cloud computing programmer – are also not covered in this report. The 21 jobs we present here are those that we expect to become prominent in short order. Most importantly, we believe these jobs will create mass employment, providing work for the many people in offices, stores and factory floors displaced or disrupted by technology. Our 21 jobs of the future are positioned over a 10-year timeline and according to their “tech-centricity” (see diagram, next page). Each is presented in the form of a job description. They’re not science fiction – they’re jobs your HR department will have to fill before very long. Some are highly technical, while others won’t require much tech knowledge at all. (Some may insist that one day all jobs will be tech jobs, but we don’t agree, and that certainly won’t be the case in the next 10 years.) Work has been central to mankind for millennia. Our very names convey that fact: Baker, Brewer, Glover, Woodman, Wright, Mason, Judge, Weaver, Hunter, Dyer, Fisher. In the future, work will continue to be core to our identities, our nature, our dreams and our realities. But it won’t necessarily be the work we know or do now. Read on to examine the new jobs that will be central to the future. You never know, one day you might be doing one of them.

This critical and scoping review essay analyses digital labour markets where labour-intensive services are traded by matching requesters (employers and/or consumers) and providers (workers). It focuses on digital labour markets which allow the remote delivery of electronically transmittable services (i.e. Amazon Mechanical Turk, Upwork, Freelancers, etc.) and those where the matching and administration processes are digital, but the delivery of the services is physical and requires direct interaction. The former broad type is called Online Labour Markets (OLMs) and is potentially global. The latter broad type is termed Mobile Labour Markets (MLMs) and is by definition localised. The essay defines and conceptualises these markets proposing a typology which proves to be empirically valid and heuristically useful. It describes their functioning and the socio-demographic profiles of the participants, reviews their economic and social effects, discusses the possible policy implications, and concludes with a research agenda to support European level policy making. It alternates the discussion of ‘hard’ findings from experimental and quasi-experimental studies with analysis of ‘softer’ issues such as rhetorical discourses and media ‘hyped’ accounts. This triangulation is inspired by, and a tribute to, the enduring legacy of the work of Albert O. Hirschman and his view that ideas and rhetoric can become endogenous engines of social change, reforms, and policies. This essay tries to disentangle the rhetoric with available empirical evidence in order to enable a more rational debate at least in the discussion of policies, if not in the public arena.

To understand what the future holds for intelligent automation, we surveyed 537 North American and European organizations, ranging from banks and insurers (property/casualty/life), to healthcare payers (see methodology, page 22). Our findings reveal significant new trends. The first centers around the ability of intelligent automation to improve materially upon what people can do, as well as unlock meaning from data using process analytics. In some cases, organizations are automating work completely through digitization by re-imagining and instrumenting a process from its inception to harness the power of emerging digital technologies, such as social, mobile, analytics and cloud (or the SMAC StackTM). Our research also shows that through these technologies, humans are attaining new levels of process efficiency, such as improved operational cost, speed, accuracy and throughput volume. By using increasingly more astute technologies, smart businesses are doing a much better job of tackling complex process opportunities. In short, they are fast becoming force-multipliers to people who are still essential to process work in banking, healthcare, life sciences and insurance.

The depth and extent of the global financial crisis suggest the economic system is likely to undergo some major changes. This paper looks at one aspect of how 'tomorrow's capitalism' could differ from the neo-liberal model of the past: the balance of the United Kingdom's economy. In particular, it focuses on employment and asks how government can support the transition to a stronger and more balanced labour force. While the immediate fiscal and monetary measures introduced by the Government and Bank of England to combat the recession are important, our focus is on longer term patterns of growth and government action.