NOTE: This is part two of a two-part Q&A interview. Part one was published on January 21.

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$: In Future Skills Centre’s research, as well as in your work with on-the-ground partner organizations, what have been the most recent emerging labour market trends that Canadians should be attuned to as they navigate the job market, and do any stand out as being particularly exciting in terms of productivity and economic potential?

NB: There are a few things that I would point to. One of them is we need to do labour market information differently so that it's more responsive, it's more local, more granular. Because the truth about Canada's labour market is that I think it's a bunch of labour markets and they look really different in different parts of the country. What's happening in Montreal is not the same as what's happening in northern Quebec. Some of it is relatable, but much of it's different. Someone told me this anecdote that in the official labour market data for Newfoundland and Labrador, they have actually grouped the western part of the island with Labrador. Which would render the information almost totally useless. So how do we do it better? How do we do it faster? How do we do it more granularly?

This is where technology can help. Some of our partners, like the Conference Board of Canada [now renamed Signal49 Research] have worked on this, and I know the federal government has been working on it as well. One of the things we do is regular surveys of Canadians, broad population-based surveys. I think there's a bunch of really interesting stuff that's come out of there. One of the most interesting insights, I think, is around artificial intelligence. We’ve been asking people about their use of AI at work. We've done that over the last two years and it's been a jump in one year from about 30 percent to about 40 percent of people saying that they've used AI at work. The interesting corollary, though, is we also ask people if they're doing that because they've been told to and if they've received any training to do it. Those numbers are significantly lower and they seem to be flat. So we’re going to investigate this again in the coming year. I'll be really curious to see how those trends evolve, change or don't change. Because one of the things that strikes me is that a lot of people are effectively experimenting with the [AI] technology at work, but without guidance, without guardrails, and without a lot of support to be proficient at it. So one might ask if we are perhaps taking on some of the risk that exists with the current state of the technology, but whether we'll actually be able to capture that kind of productivity benefit that I think people are hoping for.

You can have a conversation about whether it's going to lead to the productivity benefit or not, but right now people are kind of doing it on their own and they're doing it without a lot of guidance or support. I think that is an interesting finding and also potentially a risk in that.

I think the other thing is we continue to hear pretty remarkably consistent feedback, from almost every time we ask the question, about the kind of skills that are needed. I think the trend throughout the six years that Future Skills Centre has been around has largely been to hear from employers that they are not necessarily over-indexing on specific technical skills. What they want is people who are adaptable, can problem solve within a field, who can work well with others and communicate well. Those are also the kind of skills that people value when you ask them what do they think are the skills that are going to help them be most relevant in the next stage of their career. It’s by and large the same thing. It's a pretty remarkable alignment and consistency on that. 

R$: The Future Skills Centre has conducted extensive research into the impacts of job automation. How can the federal government help workers who need to transition their careers in the face of automation, but especially more vulnerable populations who may not have access to continuing education opportunities to do so? 

NB: I think especially as we move into this period where all governments, but the federal government playing a really important lead role, are looking at driving projects and they’re looking at driving a pretty significant transition in the way that the economy works, it really is important for them to either convene themselves or to work with partners who convene the key actors in these in these spaces – employers, workers, education and training providers. Because one of the things that is most challenging to do at a policy level in Canada is the kind of coordination and planning to say, ‘OK, we're building this major project in the next couple of years. But also the big utility in this area wants to expand or improve the electrical grid. How do we make sure that we have all the workers to do that with all the skills they need at the in the right places at the right time?’ The federal government has announced plans for workforce alliances, which I think are an attempt on their part to do more of that and to do better at that, which I think is really important. We've also seen what seem to be improvements in the coordination and relationship with provinces and territories, which is critical because of course they hold most of the levers on the formal education system, but also on regulating professions and on other training providers and who gets to operate and under what kind of conditions. So that kind of collaboration and coordination is really important.

The other thing, and I think it's all related to this, is there's also got to be enough flexibility in all of that coordination for solutions to kind of bubble up from the from the ground. Communities are best placed to solve the problems in their communities. They need the support and infrastructure and direction to know where broader policy agendas are headed. But then they've got to get together with the people in their town or their city or their region and pull together the resources they've got at hand, so that they really drive the direction of that. We’ve got to  find that balance between coordination at a high level and then problem solving and solution finding at a much more local level. 

And that will some ways will help to address the question of vulnerable populations, too. That’s a global phenomenon, but it has very local, distinct nuance to it. You’ve got to be thinking about those questions at the front end of your process of figuring out where you're headed. How are we doing this as one of the first steps, not one of the last ones. Otherwise you end up with all kinds of challenges down the road if you, if you leave it to the end. 

R$: What do you feel are Canada’s labour market strength – what do we bring to the table as a workforce and as a country that isn’t being offered anywhere else, and how do we leverage these strengths to build a globally competitive labour market? 

NB: [Canadians] are not just highly educated, but highly skilled. Every 10 years the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) does an international study of the skills of working-aged adults and Canada has always performed well. The last one was released in December 2024 on test literacy, numeracy and problem solving. And in a period where many countries saw declines in performance, Canada either held steady on most of those or improved. We're not number one, but you'd much rather be in Canada's place than in those of others. I would say, too, really importantly, we haven't enough sample in that study to be able to look, for example, at the performance of immigrants to Canada. I think there's been a lot of discussion over the last decade about whether changes to immigration policies have meant that newcomers to Canada might not be as highly skilled as in the past. But I'd say Canadian immigrants compared to immigrants and other OECD countries performed very well. There did not seem to be within the data something that you could point you to say there's a real problem there. So [Canada has] highly skilled, highly educated [immigrants] I think, compared to some other countries in the world.

One of the things that's a feature of Canadian education, not a bug, is we have a lot of flexibility in terms of people's pathways that you can start down one route and decide that's not for me or I'm headed into a sector that is going to be in decline and I want to make a change. That’s not as easy in other parts of the world. So I think that is a real strength for us that we can take advantage of. I think we also have to make sure that we maintain the sort of social safety net that we've built for people to have some stability if something changes in their life. That’s  really important and we need to safeguard that. We probably need to make some improvements around that to make sure it's up to par with a really rapidly shifting economy and labour market. But again, you’d rather be in the kind of position that we are than in some other places where they don't have that as a strength. 

R$: One of the things I've written about for Research Money is we have this highly skilled workforce, but a lot of employers say, ‘Yes, we appreciate those skills, but there are some of these other skills that the young people don't get trained in at postsecondary institutions or even through some work-integrated learning programs’ – although less so there. That seems to go back to the need for the training in the foundational skills, also called soft skills. Do we need to put more emphasis on  doing that? 

NB: I don't know that I have a very clear answer, because the other thing that we find when we look at the OECD data is their observation is that there’s number of Canadians being over-skilled or overqualified for the roles that they’re in. I don't think we know enough about this phenomenon, but I'm hoping we can learn more in the next couple of years. I'm not totally sure what's underlying that, but there’s some conversation that we need to have sort of at a societal level about ‘Why is it that we keep hearing people are not quite prepared to go into work, at the same time as we're we are observing that they may have more qualifications than they need for the jobs that they're in? How does all this stuff sort of link together?’ There are really important conversations that are underway led by a number of different organizations that I hope will start to include more conversations with government about the future of our formal education systems, both K to 12 and postsecondary.

Postsecondary systems are under a lot of strain right now and a lot of that people point to what happened on the internationalization side [with the federal cap on international students and limits on graduate work permits]. Some of that is a function of decisions about domestic resource allocations, too. Some of that's about a reaction to policies around funding that are about as much about domestic students as international students. But the other thing is that all of our schools and our universities and colleges have been asked to do a lot more over the last probably 20 years. Some of that is activity that may have to stop and we have to have a kind of honest, open conversation about that. There’s a lot to unpack there.

But certainly Canadians are skilled and we can't lose that advantage, especially in this [time] of real technological change. There does seem to be this narrative that AI will be able to fill skill gaps. I'm unconvinced. I'm equally unconvinced that you can just become a prompt engineer [e.g. for generative AI models] without having a strong base of literacy and numeracy, problem solving and information processing skills. I don't see it yet. Maybe we'll get there, but the idea that if you just learn how to use the technology better, you won't have to work on those other things, you won't have to build up those other skills. I think is a is potentially a false and pretty damaging narrative for people. 

R$: The Future Skills Centre recently launched the Resilient Workforce Working Table. What is the purpose of this? How do you expect it will help Canada’s workforce, and what does success look like for this Working Table?

We launched it in the summer after watching some of the early actions, effectively taken by the U.S. administration, that were starting to destabilize [the Canada-U.S. relationship]. But also to open up opportunities for Canada to reshape its economy. Both as an organization with the mandate we have, focused on making sure Canadians are keeping up the skills to navigate all this stuff, but also as a publicly funded organization, we wanted to bring together some of our partners and also some folks who are not yet our partners to think with us about what does it mean to have a resilient workforce? What does it mean to make sure that we've got the resources in place as people experience dislocation or see disruption coming down the road, but also how do we do the big new opportunities?

So we've got this this group together. We'll have an early interim report early in 2026 that sets out what we've talked about so far. And then a little bit further down the road, we hope that we can have some really kind of practical actionable insights that we can share not only with government, but with those other actors I've mentioned a few times – employers and workers and education and training institutions. To try to think about and hopefully drive some dialogue about getting  these ducks lined up in a row, so that as this disruption is taking place we're also adapting to it and making sure that we've got systems and resources ready to be responsive and proactive. 

R$