Noah D. Arney

Tag: Education

  • Changing Employee Cohorts and Retention

    Originally two twitter threads: thread 1 thread 2.

    It took everyone a bit of time to notice this year, but the labour market shortage is basically being driven by mass retirements over the last two years, just not where you think (is the cultural moment for a Madisynn MCU reference past? Probably). Employment stats time. All of this is some back of the napkin calculations from Stats Can’s info on people accessing retirement benefits and leaving or entering the workforce.

    We know people have been pushing retirements a bit later, and recent stats back this up. In the last 9 years, as this has been happening there’s been an average of about 100K new retirees under 65 in Canada. It took a dive during the pandemic of 8% and 10%. So more people retiring a year or two or five later than they used to. As with every other economic shock, the pandemic made more people avoid early retirement a little. So fewer people retiring under 65.

    What you might not know though is that the number of people retiring at 65 went up during the pandemic, up 5.4% for men and 6.6% for women. Interesting, yes? So during the pandemic fewer people retired early, but more retired at the standard age.

    But we also have stats for those who stayed in the workforce well past standard retirement age. For those still working at 70 or above the retirement numbers during the pandemic jumped over 300% for men and over 900% for women. It’s not quite as drastic for the 66-69 group, but it’s still significantly increased. So all those people who delayed retirement before the pandemic decided this was the right time to retire.

    The question everyone was asking as this labour market tightening happened was: where are the workers? Well the people who were working well past retirement age have now retired. And that might not seem like a lot, but it’s about an extra 100 thousand people (over 65) leaving the workforce over the last last two years than was expected, and that’s not counting the over 5,000 people in the 20-65 age group who died in Canada from COVID.

    So the Baby Boomers are retiring, as was foretold. We expected this. But, even more impactful, the incoming age cohorts are shrinking, the current group of teens is 20% smaller than the current group of new professionals. The preparing for retirement cohort is the same size as the new professionals cohort, so the labour shortage isn’t going to go away any time soon, because the group of replacement workers coming up isn’t big enough to make an impact.

    What does this mean for retention then? Employers need to adapt, because young people have something they haven’t had since before 2006: options.

    What was a shortage in manufacturing, construction, and retail in 2018 has now hit health care and professional roles, and it will just keep going. I’ve been thinking a lot about this with the discussion regarding work-from-home, return-to-work, quiet quitting / work to rule, skills gaps, and the labour shortage.

    If you want your employees to go above and beyond you need to offer one of these things:

    1. intrinsic rewards: motivates staff to want to do more, like work that is impactful or fulfilling or helps them grow and develop in the ways they want to.
    2. extrinsic rewards: pay for the extra time and effort either through overtime, bonuses, or other tangible rewards.
    3. career development: people will do more for you if their positions are secure or if they have a path to promotion.

    Once upon a time these three were considered standard in a professional role, but over time as the number of professional roles have grown, they’ve decreased. That probably was because of labour oversupply. Retirement age got later and more people finished university so the total # of people wanting professional jobs went up much faster than the number of jobs. But that started shifting about 4 years ago, and rapidly in the last year.

    The retirement bump that was promised in 2000 didn’t materialize until right before the 2008 recession, so the cohort ready to move into those jobs didn’t get them as they were cut. But the seeds of the labour shortage were there. 2012 saw an outlier level retirement group. After that things cooled off for a few years, then in 2015 they started picking up steam again, and by 2018 statisticians could see that there was going to be a labour shortage. COVID19 layoffs obscured it for a while, but now that those layoffs are over we can see the result.

    The labour shortage that was expected in 2000 didn’t happen, the one in ’06 was offset by the recession in ’08, and the delayed cohort of young people was more than enough to cover what should have been a shock to the system in ’12. But demographics keep marching on.

    We’ve expected it 22 years, and now it’s here, and that’s a very good thing for young people (if inflation and housing prices don’t destroy the gains). Employers, look at those 3 things, if you don’t offer them, then your employees will get snatched up by an employer who does.

  • Automation and Career Development

    This was originally a twitter thread

    I’m seeing a lot of people talking about how people should go into HS only jobs or trades instead of university. Lets put aside that the unemployment rate for trades is often worse than jobs that require a university degree, instead I’ll tell you a story about the economy.

    I grew up in BC. And the alternative to university that was pushed when I was in high school was either the family farm (I lived in a farming community) or the lumber industry. FYI, this is a #CareerDevelopment story.

    It was the 90s and the lumber industry was strong. If you weren’t from a farming family the non-university jobs talked about were forestry/lumber, construction, plumber/electrician, and first responders. In the mill towns it was pretty much just forestry/lumber.

    The forestry and lumber industry was very people intensive. People to cut trees, people to plant trees, people to move logs, people to run the mills, people to support all of those industries, people to work in secondary industries (wood product manufacturing).

    So it’s the 90s and there’s about 100,000 jobs in the industry. They’re good jobs, well paid jobs. Most of them require no post-secondary or maybe a certificate.

    When I moved to Calgary five years ago the way people talked about the oil sands was exactly the way people talked about the lumber industry in BC when I was a kid.

    Now, I say that there were good jobs, and there were, but the number of jobs wasn’t really going up. And this doesn’t get noticed in the short term, but what it means is that the industry isn’t growing, which means the future won’t be bright for people trying to get in.

    Oh, productivity kept going up, the money the industry brought into the province kept going up, but employment was stagnant. That was never mentioned to teens looking to what their future could be though.

    So, what happened to that industry? Well, the 2000s happened. And at the end of it the industry had shrunk 50%. The 2000s were filled with talk about how we needed to “retrain” forestry and lumber workers.

    Magic bullet after magic bullet was proposed. The government started talking up trades, while ignoring the increasing trades unemployment rate. The jobs that had lower unemployment? Work that required a bachelors degree.

    FYI, here’s the Forestry & Lumber industry over 20 years. Yeah, it was bad.

    I talked in depth about the so-called Trades shortages about five years ago. TL:DR the only trades that have lower unemployment than bachelors degree requiring jobs are the ones that required two years of post-secondary apprenticeship program.

    That’s an important point a lot of people forget. Trades school in Canada is run through the same post-secondary system as Bachelors. The programs are generally 1/2 the length, but that’s it. So when I talk about post-secondary I mean Certs, Diplomas, Trades, and Degrees.

    What’s the point of this story?

    1. jobs that don’t require post-secondary are being automated
    2. once a resource extraction industry automates they never bring the jobs back
    3. people with post-secondary have an easier time changing industries when jobs disappear

    So, if you want to tell someone not to go to get a Bachelors degree, you’re still probably going to be telling them to go to post-secondary. That’s the way of the world now.

    As I look back on the people who talked up forestry when I was a kid I notice something. Most of them were let go when the mill automated or they changed industries in their late 40s. Some of them went to post-secondary then to retrain/reskill, and that’s a good thing.

    But here’s where it comes to Alberta. The same automation warning signs are there for the oil & gas industry. I had a student who I worked with a few years ago. He’d spent 15 years in the oil sands and decided to change jobs. Why? Because he saw the signs. He knew that his job was going to be automated in the next five years, so he decided to train now for the IT job that was going to replace 10 people who were doing what he was doing before.

    And that’s where we get back to #CareerDevelopment. Students need to learn not what the past industries were, but what industries are growing and flourishing. That is going to require post-secondary, of some kind.

  • Skills Assessment and Behaviourism

    This was going to be a short twitter thread, then it got too long, so I made a blog post instead. I read an opinion piece in the Toronto Star today and I’m concerned. Mostly I’m concerned about the train of thought it represents. The article, “We need to start giving soft skills more credit“, is the newest version of similar work around soft/transferable skills that’s been around for years, but now with AI.

    This seems like a good thing, because employers want employees with strong transferable skills, and colleges and universities already teach technical skills, and programs are designed so that students pick up transferable skills along the way. My problem is that the discourse is always focused on a behaviourist understanding of people. It presupposes that:

    1. Students must be explicitly taught something to learn it
    2. Evaluation means learning happened
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  • Book Review of “The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching”

    A snippet from my review posted at the Canadian Journal of Higher Education

    In my classes I try to explain to second year comput-ing students that their technical skills are only one part of what they need to succeed. Many jobs are like that, requiring both discipline or field specific skills and trans-ferable or soft skills. In The Missing Course: Everything They Never Taught You About College Teaching (2019) David Gooblar explains that for postsecondary profes-sors teaching is not a soft skill, it is a second discipline we should be engaging in the same way we engage with our primary discipline.

    The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning is not a new discipline. However, it is often neglected in grad-uate studies, relegated to the individual’s professional development rather than being a core part of the curric-ulum. The Missing Course (2019) is Gooblar’s attempt to provide a concise and practical overview of teaching and learning with the objective of helping college and university instructors improve their classroom teaching. It is a valuable book for everyone who teaches or plans to teach in postsecondary from full professors to new graduate students.

  • Assessment, Research, and Ethics

    This was originally posted at SA-Exchange, but the site has since shut down and so it is now posted in its entirety here.

    by Noah D. Arney, Mount Royal University

    This Research, Assessment & Evaluation series is brought to you by the CACUSS Research, Assessment, Evaluation Community of Practice.

    The idea for this post came from a colleague of mine who was telling me about a new project he had implemented. He explained why he and another colleague had designed the project, what they wanted to do with it, how the roll out happened, what he saw happen based on the one on one interviews he was doing with students, what he thought that meant, and how he changed the program as a result of it. Then he told me how he didn’t feel he had remembered to assess it.

    He had, of course, assessed the roll out, and then utilized that information to improve his practice. What he meant was that he hadn’t conducted research on the project. I suspect a lot of student affairs practitioners have similar thoughts, that our assessment needs to be done at the level of academic research.

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  • Supporting Indigenous STEM Students

    This is a snippet of Michelle Pidgeon and my post at Supporting Student Success.

    The disparity of post-secondary education (PSE) completion between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians (40% vs. 55.3%) continues to persist (Statistics Canada, 2016). Unfortunately, the disparity is wider when we compare undergraduate degree completion between Indigenous (8.6%) and non-Indigenous Canadians (23.25%). The gap of post-secondary completion (certificate, diploma, degree, and above) specific to the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields is even wider. Indigenous people are half as likely to have STEM based PSE (4.1% vs. 10%), and for those with STEM Bachelors degree and above, the gap moves to being a fifth as likely (1.1% vs. 5.7%).

    In 2012 Mount Royal University in Calgary, Alberta created the Aboriginal Science & Technology Education Program (ASTEP) to support the growth of Indigenous STEM students in the Faculty of Science and Technology. This program operated from 2012-2019 and represented one of three Indigenous specific STEM programs offered specifically at the university level in Canada.  To understand the impact and influence of this program an external review was conducted in 2017 following Indigenous research processes (Kovach, 2009; Pidgeon & Hardy Cox, 2002). This process included an analysis of institutional data, comparisons with similar programs, and interviews and sharing circles with students, staff, and faculty who were closely associated with ASTEP.

    Read the rest at Supporting Student Success

  • Review: Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education

    This was originally posted at SA-Exchange, but the site has since shut down.

    Sandra D. Styres 2017 book Pathways for Remembering and Recognizing Indigenous Thought in Education: Philosophies of Iethi’nihsténha Ohwentsia’kékha (land) is a key addition to the literature around understanding core concepts in Indigenous philosophies of education.

    The audience of this book is academics who want to be able to express the specific philosophies that Indigenous people bring to education. It is not a book aimed at practitioners so much as researchers. Although it touches on story as a teaching method (Archibald, 2008) it does not utilize that as a primary method itself. There is some teaching through story but not nearly as much as a book like Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. This book falls somewhere between western academic writing and Indigenous teaching through story, and that is one of its strengths. In addition, while Styres is trying to explain concepts that are common to many Indigenous peoples, she is approaching educational philosophy from a Haudenosaunee perspective.

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  • Rhetorical Misuse

    There are some people whose rhetorical goal is to bring the reader/listener to a point of numbness where they feel that the topic is too complex to understand and they defer to the expert. This is especially used when talking with those who agree with the premises and conclusion that the speaker/writer has. Thus the reader/listener feels good because their view has been supported by an expert, and the writer/speaker feels good because they have received support.

    But in reality all that has happened is the linking of premise and conclusion with a bunch of wibbly wobbly rhetorical wimey stuff that isn’t a functional argument.

    This leads to polarization of belief as camps grow around the speaker/writer and they are combative with other groups around a different speaker/writer who disagree with the premises or conclusions, but because the speakers/writers never actually educated their groups but simply provided them with unlinked premises and conclusions the two groups turn their backs on each other because to admit that they don’t understand it is to admit that they might be wrong. It is to admit that they hold the premises and conclusions not because it’s true but because they received confirmation of their biases from an “expert”. It is to admit that their proof is based not on truth but on a misunderstanding or misrepresentation of the evidence or of the opponents perspective.