Thank you, and thank you to the members of the committee for inviting me to present today.
I'm the director of the Centre for Human Capital Policy at the Canada West Foundation, based in Calgary. The Canada West Foundation is a non-partisan think tank.
Given the time constraints, this submission is aimed primarily at question number two, although my comments will be relevant to the other two as well.
Safety, quality, productivity, and cost, and whether an employer wants to expand, to innovate, or just to meet its current goals—all of these depend upon the quality of its workforce, and that quality depends on how competent workers are to do their jobs. We've been engaged in a fascinating case study involving a firm, its union, and their focus on competencies as distinct from credentials. The results are striking, as you will hear.
On the whole, employers in Canada have accepted credentials to be a proxy for competence. They shouldn't. We've all heard stories about highly qualified people who are incompetent at what they do. While we would never say that credentials do not mean anything, we can say that they do not guarantee competence. Knowing something is not the same as understanding it. Knowing theoretically how something should be done does not mean you can do it. Knowing how to do something under normal conditions does not mean that you can do it when things have changed, and things change all the time.
Knowing, doing, and being able to adapt how you do a task according to the circumstances: that is competence. Competence can be built and it can be assessed, and Canada's workplaces would be safer, produce more quality products and services, and be more productive if we switched to educating, training, assessing, and deploying people on the basis of competencies.
What do I mean by competencies? Think of Lego. Standardized, modular, stackable competencies are the knowledge, skills, and attributes required to perform the tasks of each job. They become the building blocks of a career. Competency profiles show workers which competencies they need to perform their current job, or do it better. A competency framework is the pathway between jobs and occupations.
This isn't just theory. I am working with a steel fabricator in Edmonton and the ironworkers union that represents its workforce. Just over four years ago, one of the workers was almost killed on the job, and the firm decided that it would never happen again. Since then, it has moved toward assessing and training for competencies in its workforce. When someone is assessed by the foreman to be not competent to do a particular task, he or she is not assigned to be responsible for it. An assessment of “needs training” in a particular competency is a signal that the company and the union will invest in training. Formal training is offered, or a coach or mentor is assigned to help the workers increase their competence.
The results speak volumes. They are working more safely. The company now has had four million hours of loss-free time on its job sites. It had never exceeded half a million hours before. It is also hiring throughout the downturn in Alberta, and has just had its second-best year ever, while in a recession. It did this with the full co-operation of the union.
This company's experience does not have to be a one-off. Canada is well behind other countries in moving to competencies. We can and should move more quickly to encourage more businesses to hire, train, assess, and deploy their workforces on the basis of competencies. It is the norm in many countries. We need it to become the norm here if we are to be more competitive in the global economy.
While education is a provincial responsibility, the federal government invests hundreds of millions of dollars per year in workplace training through the Canada job grant and other labour market development funds. Reporting for these programs is more about outputs than outcomes. Certificates earned are assumed to be proxies for what has been learned.
This government should require that these federally funded training programs report on the competencies actually gained by participants in the programs, not the number of certificates earned. Employers benefiting from these programs could be encouraged to recruit on the basis of competencies, rather than assuming that people who have earned a certificate are actually competent to do the job for which they are hiring.
If the federal government does this, individuals, businesses, and communities will meet their goals and better contribute to the economic success of the country.
Thank you.