Yes. I didn't mention ASEP or any funding that I didn't believe was the focus of the committee, but we are very active participants in some of the funding that comes from different departments, particularly where it's focused on aboriginal peoples or northern remote areas. ASEP would be a perfect example. We are active in the two last northern career quest programs as an industry partner with education in government, where we're trying to create additional employment opportunities for what would be first nations individuals, which typically have been entry-level roles.
I think our biggest challenge today and for the future will be that those roles that would have existed 10 to 15 years ago as entry level or semi-skilled are just not going to exist in the future because of automation, drives for technical advancement. It's going to be harder and harder for individuals to come to a workplace or an industrial facility like ours with no formal education. Those roles are just simply going to drop off.
The challenge is how to get large segments of a small population to advance their education when their goal is to find employment and past generations have shown that they've made it into the workforce. There needs to be some incentives both from government and employers to advance individuals into the workforce so that they leave previously held roles and open up opportunities for new people coming in, because, just simply, net job creation in the future for us is not going to be at the entry level. It's going to be at the professional and technical level. I'm sure Michael Atkinson talked about some of the pressures on select occupations. Well, those select occupations just happen to be the areas where, traditionally, aboriginal people haven't held those roles. So it's going to be a struggle for us as an organization to maintain half of our employment for first nations and Métis people if we don't see advancement inside our own organization into areas like I talked about, apprenticeship or other areas in the professional and technical sphere.