Noah D. Arney

Tag: skills

  • Employment Training and Skills Gaps

    Originally two twitter threads: thread 1 thread 2.

    Careering Magazine (part of CERIC) had an article by Malika Asthana (from the LMS company D2L) about The Skills-Gap Paradox.

    It showed a substantial disconnect from employers with the research essentially showing them saying:

    1. We worry about if we can recruit people with skills we need
    2. We don’t have capacity to deliver internal training
    3. We don’t provide time off or funding for external training
    4. We don’t see a problem with this

    Some key quotes from that article:

    “Only 21% of decision-makers at Canadian SMEs report feeling very confident that they will have the skills and talent they need to grow their organizations over the next three years,”

    “With smaller budgets, many SMEs struggle to create and deliver robust, broad training programs in-house.” “Only 34% of SMEs in both Canada and the US provide financial support or time off for training delivered by external providers.”

    “SME decision makers said that internal training or on-the-job learning was sufficient.”

    https://ceric.ca/2022/06/the-skills-gap-paradox/

    So the question then is, how do we fix this? If there’s no time off or funding then external trainers, like PSIs, can’t help. If there’s no capacity for in-house training then contract trainers can’t help.

    Is this the logical conclusion of lean staffing?

    Well, in the mid 90s workers in Canada received an average of 44 hours of training provided by/paid by their employer, which was average for comparable countries. Most of those countries remain the same. In Canada, however, it dropped to 20 hours by the end of the ’00s.

    But this didn’t matter, it was the post ’08 employment crunch. Employers were guaranteed a stream of diagonal applicants to jobs, people who had done much of the job somewhere else for slightly less pay.

    The #greatretirement (is that a thing now?) has brought us back to the late 90s in terms of employee choice, but that means that employers aren’t able to get people with the same level of skills they relied on, because those people all got bumped up a substantial pay level.

    Employers need to get back into the employee training game or they will be left behind by those who do more/better training. If an employee is offered the same $ by two companies but one of them also offers twice as much training to move on to bigger and better things, guess who wins?

  • Short Review of Beyond Blue and White Collar

    A former twitter thread

    Hey #careerdevelopment #skills folks, Conference Board of Canada and Future Skills Centre has an interesting document out that I think needs more discussion: Beyond Blue and White Collar: A Skills-Based Approach to Canadian Job Groupings.

    It does two things, it breaks down skills into categories and breaks down jobs into 8 categories. Skills are broken into 5 categories # of skills in brackets: Basic (8), Social and Emotional (9), Resources Management (4), Systems (3), and Technical (11).

    This is a pretty cool breakdown, though that it’s different from the other skills breakdowns being used by the government is a bit frustrating. The Skills for Success is right there my friends.

    Here are the 8 groupings with the percent of current Canadian workforce: STEM professionals 7%, Knowledge workers 27%, Personal services 20%, Supervisors 9%, Technical trades 6%, Non-technical trades 6%, Builders 13%, Doers 12%.

    Laying that out by general education level:

    • 4 years PSE or more 34%
      • STEM professionals
      • Knowledge workers
    • 2 years PSE 15%
      • Technical Trades
      • Supervisors (40% have 4+, the rest have less)
    • 1 year PSE 26%
      • Personal Services
      • Non-Technical Trades
    • no PSE needed 25%
      • Builders
      • Doers

    It’s an interesting way of breaking thigs down, though “doers” does seem like a holding category for roles that don’t require PSE.

    What do you think?

  • 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.

  • 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
    (more…)