NOTE: This is part one of a two-part Q&A interview. Part two will be published on January 28.

The Future Skills Centre (FSC) is an independent research and innovation organization dedicated to helping Canadians gain the skills they need to thrive in a changing labour market.

FSC recognizes that Canada’s economy is evolving rapidly as a result of technological, demographic, environmental and geopolitical change. That change inevitably alters the nature of work – creating new opportunities and also engendering new threats.

FSC was conceived to address those opportunities and challenges by fostering a more responsive skills development ecosystem.

Noel Baldwin (photo at right) has been the Executive Director of FSC since June, 2024, and joined FSC in 2019 as director of government and public affairs. He brings nearly two decades of experience in leading strategic initiatives and policy development in postsecondary education, adult learning and skills development.

FSC has successfully forged strong relationships with federal departments, provinces, territories, municipalities and international organizations. Baldwin’s efforts drove FSC’s early strategic initiatives, including targeted investments addressing critical gaps across regions and sectors.

Prior to joining FSC, he was the coordinator of postsecondary education and adult learning at the Council of Ministers of Education, Canada.

In a Q&A interview, Baldwin talked with Research Money’s managing editor Mark Lowey about: how Canadian workers can keep upskilling in the face of automation and rapid technological change; how young people can gain the right skills in finding employment; the value of formal and information education and work-integrated learning; how government can help workers who need transition in their careers; Canada’s labour market strengths; and the aim of FSC’s recently launched Resilient Workforce Working Table.

R$: Emerging technologies like AI, machine learning and quantum are evolving at a breakneck pace, with a matching shortage of skills for these technologies to be deployed at scale in Canadian businesses. What can Canadian workers do to keep upskilling in the face of increased automation, and how can policymakers and the private sector help to facilitate workers’ transitions to new roles – and even new careers? 

NB: One the workers side, what we find in the work that we're doing is it's a real challenge for people living busy lives, especially those already in work but also with family obligations, to find the time to do this [keep upskilling]. But it is super important. The options available to people to do upskilling and retraining today are vast compared to in the past. So I think sometimes people get a little narrowly focused – probably because they don't have time to explore all the options –  on experiences they’ve already had or or things that they know about. Like you’ve got to go back to university or you’ve got to go back to college, and today that's just not true. You can do [upskilling] online and on demand so that it fits your schedule. Increasingly, we're seeing opportunities like micro-credentials, which are much shorter in duration, but give a recognized qualification that shows you've mastered a skill or demonstrated a skill or a new area of expertise. So I think people need to take some of those opportunities that can actually be managed much more easily in the course of a busy day-to-day life.

One of the things we have to improve on in Canada – and this is something policymakers are working on – is connecting the dots for people in an easy way to understand where those opportunities are and what kind of challenges people are actually navigating. We hear a lot in our sector about the need for better labour market information. But I think beneath the surface of that, it's not just ‘Do we have the data sets?,’ it's ‘How do we actually put them into the hands of people and then connect it to training and upskilling and reskilling opportunities?’ I think that the other thing policymakers need to figure out working with employers is how to make sure their employers have a stake in this and also that they have some skin in the game.

Historically, part of the context is Canada has a lot of smaller firms – small and medium-sized enterprises. They have less of their own internal resources to do this stuff. But I think Canadian employers still historically probably underinvest compared to employers in other country in the countries in the development of their own staff. It’s often seen as a risk, like ‘I'll train these people and then they'll leave.’ But of course the alternative is they may leave anyway if they don't have opportunities for growth. And the staff that you're left with then are even more under-skilled, maybe, than you might already be finding as an employer. So how could employers and government and workers get together to try to shape a system that's going to keep our workforce as skilled as possible, as skilled as we need, that’s going to help firms to grow, that's going to de-risk for both workers and their employers the actual process of lifelong learning and maintaining and building new skills?

R$: Young people entering the workforce are faced with a constantly changing labour market owing to geopolitical tensions and a rapidly shifting technological landscape. How can young people develop confidence in their ability to find gainful employment, especially when faced with economic uncertainties? What mechanisms does the Future Skills Centre offer that are tailored specifically to the needs of Canada’s emerging workforce?

NB: Young people are really in a tough spot right now. Historically, we have often seen in periods of economic uncertainty that young people are can be pretty dramatically affected. There's really important research that came out of the financial crisis about the scarring effects of late entry into the workforce. But today [young people] are being pinched not only by that kind of economic uncertainty that’s resulting from international conditions and the [trade tariff] actions taken by the United States, they’re also dealing with a massive technological revolution. Some of the early impacts that we're seeing on the integration of artificial intelligence into firms is that it's first effect is to hollow out some of the kind of entry-level work that people often do to get their foot in the door, which is often repetitive and monotonous. And it's the kind of thing today's AI can actually help with. But in the past those would have been jobs done by young people getting their foot in the door trying to figure out their career.

And then we really need to not overlook is there's a real long tail from [the COVID pandemic] that I think is particularly impacting people starting out their careers, because they lost a lot of opportunities at the end of their process of formal education in many cases, where they could have been getting some of the kind of work experiences that helps you navigate a workplace. Just being at work helps you understand that cultural piece, which is often what employers say is missing. Graduates show up and they're not ready for the workplace. Well, for lots of the folks who are entering the labour force right now, that's exacerbated by the fact that for a couple years [during COVID] they could hardly work. Then they had to work from home remotely and they didn't benefit from a lot of those networking opportunities. It's a real kind of classic wicked problem because there's not a single solution that can touch on all of those. I think young people are truly, truly in a bit of a bind.

So there's a few things I think that I would point to. On the economic piece we’ve seen governments go back to some things that they know have worked in the past, [like] enhanced funding for summer job programs, enhanced funding for work-integrated learning programs so that while people are in studies they get exposure to work. The Government of Alberta has implemented a wage subsidy program for employers, for example. So we need to see how that's playing out. On the technology side, I think that there's a rush right now to continue to develop the technology and I think the piece that's missing is we're still at the beginning of trying to figure out how these technologies enter workplaces and how they actually enhance the productivity of human workers rather than replacing people. There's going to be some displacement and some transition there.

But in some ways, the folks who are likely to be at the forefront of understanding those dynamics are actually young people. My niece and nephew are much more versed in how to use AI relatively effectively than I am. Certainly younger people entering the workforce are I think going to be way more comfortable and better versed than their bosses, even before accounting for things like ‘Can you do training around this?’ So in some ways there is an opportunity to have young people help to shape the way that that technology is developed and implemented in workplaces. We need to look at opportunities to develop that.

Then people need exposure to workplaces. Lots of people still need really important social supports. There's still a lot of mental health stuff that's playing out, especially for young people who had a really strange end of their time in formal education. We have to be mindful of that and put supports in place for that. Then as we're going through this big boom of major projects here [in Canada] – we want to build a whole bunch of stuff – how do we make sure that those opportunities are inclusive of young workers and also that they're geared to what they're going to want and need? Lots of us aren't going to be around when those projects are paying off, but the people who will need to actually be a part of thinking about how it shapes their lives going forward. 

R$: What about the last part of that question – about what mechanisms the Future Skills Centre offers that are tailored specifically to the needs of Canada’s emerging workforce?

NB: The way that our programming works is we actually work through partnerships to deliver. So we haven't developed our own programs that we then go out into communities and implement. We find community-based partners who've identified a challenge, and we've done a number of things around youth. We did a a big piece with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto around that whole idea of bringing mental health supports into employment services, taking that kind of holistic approach. We did some work in British Columbia with Douglas College, trying to create opportunities for youth who've become disengaged from employment and education to come back in. One of the classic challenges is people get discouraged and then they stop going to school and they stop looking for work. And that's where you run into some significant social challenges. [We’re] trying to address some of those issues and create spaces where people can come back into that at their own speed and start to define their own pathway. This connection to things like both science and technology but also digital spaces gets a lot of interest from young people. That’s how we have been working in that space, although our portfolio is really significant. So it's not only focused on youth. 

R$:  Are there any changes you would like to see at the curricular level to increase students’ opportunities to build labour market skills? Are there any Future Skills Centre-led projects prioritizing work-integrated learning opportunities for students, and should every student have access to a work-integrated learning opportunity?

NB: On the curricular level, I'm a bit agnostic to the question in one sense because I think  curriculum is organic. It's not set in stone. I think the thing that I would reflect on, though, is the pace of change in general in our society, in our economy, in fields of discipline, is just changing at such an accelerated pace that the burden on educators to keep up with that is so high. I would say we need to start to look at all of the resources that are available around our formal education system to help people navigate what's happening. I think the days where our school systems and our postsecondary education institutions can comfortably operate somewhat in isolation from the rest of what's going on around them in the world are pretty done, and I'm not sure we've quite adapted to that.

For example, we’ve gotten to do some work with some really incredible labour unions and some of them – more than I realized – offer training for their members. It’s for their members. So that's a more limited slice of workers. But some of them [the unions] are really the ones at the forefront of making sure that skill levels keep up as technology is changing. But they're not really thought of necessarily as part of our education and training ecosystem. We just have to have a more holistic view of this and then we need to bring them [all the players involved in upskilling] into contact with each other. There’s kind of a long-standing model that universities and colleges will design things and then go ask people in the rest of the world, in the labour market, ‘Is this relevant?’ And we’ve got to flip that on its head to some extent. We can have conversations about how does that tension, that kind of push and pull, work. That’s part of the answer to the question about ‘What are we, what do we need to continue to evolve and change’? 

R$: What about the work-integrated learning piece. How involved is the Future Skills Centre in that?

NB: We have done a fair bit of that through different projects that we've initiated with partners across the country, and I think it's been successful. We've learned that it can and does build both technical and soft skills at any point of entry in the education pathway. And then you can do some really interesting stuff that can be sector- or place-based. One of the keys is you get the right actors around the table so that there's uptake of people [and] employers are ready to take on people in those working creative learning opportunities, but also that they actually create meaningful skill gain for people – meaningful exposure to work.

Should we take a view that everyone should have work-integrated learning opportunities? I think that's a reasonable goal, but we know that there are challenges around equity of opportunity in our education systems already. We need to be closing those [gaps], but then also that we don't continue to perpetuate those inequities also through work-integrated learning programming. If we know that fewer Indigenous People complete high school and go on to postsecondary education and all the work-integrated learning opportunities are at the postsecondary level, they will just miss out on something else. I think that's a really important consideration.

I've been happy and I think it's probably a good thing to see the investments that governments have made in creating more working-integrated learning opportunities. There’s been federal programming and provincial programming. Something that we don't do particularly well, however, is actually recognize the kind of skill building that happens in the kind of jobs that young people do for all kinds of other reasons. People are working all the time, even into high school, but certainly in university and college, sometimes to pay the bills because they’ve got to pay for tuition and books. Sometimes it's just to have extra pocket money. And often those jobs are not very well considered in terms of how they help people build skills and navigate work. Think about retail and service industry jobs, and we don't necessarily think of those as being ‘high skill.’ But some of the things you have to be really good at to thrive in those environments are the exact skills that we hear all the time people are looking for in work. It's collaboration, it's communication, it's teamwork, it's being able to show up on time, do your job. If you're working at a restaurant and you're late for your shift, you're not going to last for very long. But we don't look at those jobs very often and say those are jobs that are building really important skills. So there's a balance there between formalized things like co-ops and internships – super important – while also recognizing that these other jobs that people are doing for other reasons are also really important to help them navigate how they're going to find their pathway forward. 

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