Thank you, Chair and members of the committee. Thank you for the invitation.
My name is Caleb Walker. I served 20 years as an officer in the Canadian army, did three tours to Afghanistan and retired as a lieutenant-colonel. After I took off the uniform, I spent several years as a country manager for WithYouWithMe, helping veterans move into technology careers. Today, I'm a director at 123 Cyber, where, together with the Commissionaires, we're building a veteran workforce of fractional company security managers for the Canadian defence industry.
I've seen this problem as a veteran, as someone placing veterans and now as an employer. The message is simple: Canada doesn't lack skilled veterans; it just lacks a way to see their skills. Let me show you what I mean.
The Canadian Armed Forces has an online tool called MNET that matches military occupations to civilian jobs. I entered into the tool “infantry chief warrant officer”. That's someone who has 30 years of service, several deployments and who, typically, works with the command officer to do HR management for 400 soldiers. The tool matched them to an HR director, which is good, but every HR director posting I found asked for a university degree, which the soldier doesn't have.
Today, AI screening software rejects the applicant before the human even reads the file. I watched this happen to a friend. He'd been responsible for 60 soldiers. He applied for a federal public service job, but he didn't even get screened for an administrative assistant position because his military leadership doesn't count as relevant experience.
I see three reasons for this.
First, Canada has no national skills framework. Australia, by comparison, holds a country-wide licence to a skills framework for the information age, free for anyone to use. Its public service, its contractors and its training providers all describe digital skills in the same language. In Canada, every employer or university invents its own, and military experience fits none of them.
Canada does have a skills for success program, but that covers only nine foundational skills, like reading, numeracy and collaboration. I can't describe what a chief warrant officer, who's managing HR for 500 soldiers, actually does, or what a cybersecurity manager needs to know. What Canada lacks is a common framework for occupational and technical skills that employers, training providers and governments all use.
What does this look like? As an aside, Canada invested $250 million into an upskilling for industry initiative, which is run by Palette Skills. All the training is in silos, with no common skills framework. If you have been trained in agricultural technology, there's no way to translate those skills to clean technology. All different training providers use different skills frameworks.
The second issue is that we default to degrees, and our own programs reinforce it. For veterans with 12 years of service, VAC's educational training benefit is worth up to $96,000, but only about $6,000 of that can go to short courses. More than 90% is locked into college or university programs. A veteran with a mortgage and a family, who needs a three-month certification, can't use most of it, so most of the money stays in the system.
Third, until recently Canada paid little attention to the defence industry, so that industry never became a natural landing place for veterans in the way it does among our allies. At Lockheed Martin in the U.S., about one in five employees is a veteran. At Babcock in the U.K., it's roughly one in seven, and at Raytheon Australia, it's more than one in three. In Canada, we don't know the number because no one counts it. In the United States, every major federal contractor must report how many veterans it hires every year.
Here is the evidence that skills aren't the problem. At WithYouWithMe, we placed 130 veterans into federal IT jobs. We did it by upskilling them, building them up for two years with civilian experience they could put on paper. In the commercial sector, after hundreds of attempts, we placed zero. In Canada, it's just too fragmented, and there's no incentive to hire veterans. What works is defining the role and assessing people against it. That's what we are doing right now with the Commissionaires. We recruit the veteran, we train them and we certify them against clearly defined security roles. Those veterans help Canadian companies meet the security requirements to compete for defence contracts. As defence spending grows, this is the kind of pipeline Canada needs.
This isn't a veterans problem only. Newcomers in Canada and anyone whose skills are learned outside of a classroom hit the same wall. Fix it for veterans and you'll fix it for them too.
I have three recommendations: One, adopt a national skills framework, starting with the federal public service and defence suppliers, and map military occupations to it. Two, let veterans use their full educational and training benefit on short, industry-recognized certifications. Three, require federal defence suppliers to report veteran hiring, as most countries do, including the United States.
Thank you. I look forward to your questions.