Postsecondary and workplace training programs need to be overhauled to provide training in foundational skills increasingly in demand by employers, say academics and skills training experts.

In a world with artificial intelligence and other rapid technological changes, foundational skills – also called “soft skills” – are as necessary or even more critical as learning technical skills, they said during a Future Skills Centre webinar

Examples of foundation skills include collaboration and teamwork, emotional intelligence, communication, problem-solving, positive attitude, adaptability, creativity and innovation.

Research by the Future Skills Centre and its partners shows that these skills not only are becoming more important, “there’s a significant mismatch in what employers are looking for with soft skills and what workers appear to be bringing to the workplace,” said webinar moderator Alex Stephens (photo at left), director of programs at the Future Skills Centre.

“Credentials don’t necessarily relate to skills,” said Dr. Wendy Cukier (photo at right, below) , PhD, professor of entrepreneurship and innovation at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU), and founder and academic director of the Diversity Institute at TMU.

“Knowledge of the technology is necessary but insufficient,” she said. “Digital skills alone are insufficient to drive change.”

“To drive adoption of the technology, you need to understand how organizations operate. You have to understand human behaviour, how the technology will actually help achieve goals,” Cukier said.

“I think in the current environment, these [foundational] skills should be at the centre, the skills around creativity and adaptability, which are core to entrepreneurship and innovation,” she said.

Cukier pointed to Employment and Social Development Canada’s (ESDC) Skills for Success framework, launched in 2021, as still being useful, “as a starting point at least.”

ESDC’s framework includes a list with descriptors and definitions of 47 skills and 46 knowledge areas, as well as physical and personal attributes.

Every single job requires foundational skills to some degree, said Michael Burt (photo at left), vice-president of the Conference Board of Canada. “They underlie so many things.”

Without foundational skills, it’s hard for employees to move from entry-level roles into more senior positions, he said. Typically, senior levels of management require a higher level of foundational skills.

Recent research by the Conference Board of Canada found that about one-third of the lost economic value in Canada due to the skills gap is tied to foundational, or social-emotional, skills, Burt said.

Three of the top five skills where there are gaps are in social-emotional skills, including critical thinking and active listening, he noted.

“If you look at programs in the postsecondary system, the majority of them don’t deliberately try to instill social and emotional skills in their students,” Burt said.

Employers say they have trouble assessing these skills when they’re hiring people for their current workforce, and they struggle to train people in foundational skills, he added. “We don’t have a good system yet for developing these skills.”

People with foundational skills earn more, advance faster and adapt better

Karen Myers (photo at right), founder, president and CEO of non-profit organization Blueprint, pointed to a U.S. study published in Nature that looked at looked at 70 million job transitions through 20 million resumes with 1,000 different occupations.

The study provides robust evidence that people with stronger foundational skills not only earn more, they also advance, go further in their careers, and are better able to adapt to change, she said.

One training program, In Motion & Momentum+, designed by the Canadian Career Development Foundation, is “ground-breaking,” she said.

In Motion & Momentum+ (IM&M+) is a pre-employability skills training program to support individuals distant from the labour market, to address barriers to employment, build foundational skills and progress toward economic and social self-sufficiency.

The program combines person-centred, strengths-based approaches with experiential learning to foster hope, resilience and confidence who are facing employment barriers.

“What we’re seeing is that people who participate in IM&M+ make gains in some really important foundational skills,” Myers said.

Since its launch in New Brunswick in 2016 and subsequent expansion to British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and Newfoundland and Labrador, IM&M+ has been evaluated through a randomized controlled trial to rigorously assess its impact on participant outcomes.

The findings show that compared to control groups, IM&M+ participants experience higher employment rates and significant improvements in pre-employability skills, including employment hope, emotional intelligence and mental health.

Employment rates increased by 34 percentage points for the program group compared with 22 percentage points for the comparison group over 12 months. 

“Foundational skills matter not just for getting employment, but also for how people advance and people’s resilience and ability to adapt to change,” Myers said.

However, “When we go to do reskilling, these programs often don’t actually include any foundational skills training in them,” she said. “One of the things we need to think more closely about is, How do we build in some of those foundational skills” – including fostering people’s networks and sense of professional identify?

Myers pointed to a Statistics Canada study, which found that in Canada six out of seven workers who have been laid off and are in a 30-year-old to 50-year-old age category do nothing in their first year of unemployment.

“They don’t take training, they don’t move for employment, and they don’t restart a new job,” she said. “This is alarming. This is something that we really need to change.”

Also, the way Canada now does reskilling and upskilling – waiting until people are unemployed to do such training – is “both a financially and psychologically expensive approach to do it,” Myers said.

“We’ve got to be much more proactive,” she said. “As part of that, we really need to shift from thinking about input activities and outputs, to thinking about outcomes, impacts and value for money.”

Canada also needs to start shifting from individual project funding training, “which takes a lot of expertise to build a good training program,” to really understanding what employers need and building those industry relationships, Myers said.

“So we can’t start something [a training program] up and shut it down in six months. It just doesn’t work,” she said. “We’ve got to start building infrastructure in Canada related to skills.”

Change and adaptability is the “new reality”

Mark Patterson (photo at right), executive director of Magnet at Toronto Metropolitan University, said “There is no skill that you can go study today that will make you future-proof.” Magnet is a centre of innovation focused on the future of work.

“What we need to do is create a culture where we have a growth mindset, an entrepreneurial mindset, adaptability, critical thinking and curiosity,” he said.

Obtaining a certain degree shouldn’t be seen as a checkbox that will automatically get people a job, he pointed out.

Patterson said he tells students to focus “on what machines can only simulate or approximate, which is building trust, exercising judgement and leading with integrity.” Change and adaptability is the “new reality,” he said.

“We have been talking about lifelong learning for a long time, but we have not embraced it and we are not teaching it,” he added. “We are all looking for the quick fix or the quick fill that’s going to make us future-proof. There is none.”

People also need to realize that AI will change every single job in every single sector, including the skilled trades – and faster than people expect, Patterson said. “We actually should be teaching AI literacy to skilled trades now.”

He pointed to U.S. tech giant Meta, which is building a one-gigawatt-scale data centre – the largest of its kind – in New Albany, Ohio. Meta, whose total capital expenditure on AI infrastructure for 2025 is projected to be between $60 billion and $65 billion, plans to have a total compute fleet of more than 1.3 million GPUs (graphics processing units, specialized processors for rapid, parallel computation) by year-end 2025. For comparison, the company trained GPT4 on 25,000 GPUs.

Coding done by generative AI is now typically better than that done by the top human coders in the world, Patterson said.

However, learning coding is still a valuable skills and people will still need to have those deep technical skills and domain expertise to drive change in an organization, he said.

Canada should be investing in work-integrated learning as well as learning-integrated work, Patterson said. Research shows student-workplace programs help students transition from postsecondary education to the workplace.

“The learnings we have from work-integrated learning also apply outside of postsecondary, [can] be applied more broadly, and also we can bring more learning into work,” he said.

Organizations also need to realize they need to be continuously learning and incorporating new skills, Patterson said. “For an organization to be adaptive, they are going to have to embrace that, or we have a problem at the organizational level. We won’t be competitive.”

Burt pointed out that in the postsecondary sector, if it takes five years to change an academic program, “probably the changes you’re making now are irrelevant.”

For employers, adaptability is about not putting barriers in their recruitment processes, such as insisting upon this particular credential or profile, Burt said.

Cukier pointed out that during the COVID 19 pandemic, Canadian governments, postsecondary institutions, research centres and other institutions accomplished things in days or weeks that no one though was possible. “Then we slid back to the old ways.”

“There’s huge fragmentation [in our education and workforce training systems], there’s duplication, our language training is shameful,” she said.

Predatory programs exist that recruit foreign-trained doctors in Canada and tell them falsely that they’re going to help them enter the health care system for substantial fees, Cukier said. “It’s terrible. It’s appalling.”

Canada has a lot of training infrastructure, she said. “But the pieces are not working well together.”

R$