The FutureSkills lab was, on the one hand, very much focused on recognizing that we have a vibrant labour pool that's talented, diverse, and highly educated. At the same time, we are facing some very important shifts coming in the future of work and the nature of jobs, through automation and digitization and so on.
The idea of the FutureSkills lab is to fill a bit of a gap by creating a neutral entity that sits between the educational institutions, the corporate training environment, some of the non-profits that deliver skills training, some of the regulators provincially, and so on. It is to create an opportunity for all of these groups to come together and begin to identify shared challenges and experiment with new innovative approaches to skills training, after creating alignment on where some of the pain points are. It is also to create more agile data collection mechanisms to stay ahead of the trends, in particular using digital signals, which are not typically captured in labour market information systems; then very importantly, in a very evidence-driven way, to begin to collect the results of those shared experiments, bring some of the best practices from global institutions—countries such as Singapore and Australia are doing very interesting things on future skills—and make sure that those learnings are widely available to organizations at the provincial level, at the federal level, and in the non-profit sector so that we can up our game on all fronts.
We think it fills a very important gap to foster a kind of new environment and to try new approaches.