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Workforce training
INVESTING IN Workforce Development: A FEW EXAMPLES The Public Policy Forum and the Diversity Institute released a series of reports1 in 2020 exploring certain challenges in Canada’s skills ecosystem. One of these reports, titled Return on Investment: Industry Leadership on Upskilling and Reskilling their Workforce, looked at the skills gap and how Canadian and international employers are investing in employee training. It was written by Wendy Cukier, a professor at Ryerson
University's School of Business Administration and a Canadian expert on disruptive technologies, innovation processes and diversity. We have selected a number of case studies from this report detailing the efforts of Canadian and international employers to invest in employee training. The following are summaries.
In the technologies sector: AT&T This American company launched its Workforce 2020 (WF2020) program in 2013, after determining that nearly half of its 250,000 employees had skill gaps or that their skills would be inadequate for future technologies. WF2020 aims to upgrade employees' science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) skills, using online courses in collaboration with Coursera and Udacity, partnerships with leading universities and the creation of a career centre to support learning and plan for the jobs of the future. Each employee has a bank of 10 hours of training per week. An online portal gives employees access to several tools: › A career profile tool that allows you to assess your skills and work experience and compare them to the requirements of other jobs to identify skills that need to be developed; › Lists of open positions within the company, with their associated skills and the ability to connect to a nearby employee in a similar position. › Analytical data on the growth or decline in demand for certain types of jobs. Since the program's inception, AT&T has invested $250 million in employee training, including $30 million annually for tuition. The company offered up to $8,000 in annual tuition for various degrees and up to $25,000 per employee for undergraduate education and $30,000 for graduate education. At the end of 2019, 140,000 AT&T employees were taking or had taken training and nearly half of AT&T employees had completed 2.7 million online courses related to data science and management, cybersecurity and Agile project management.
This series, Skills Next, was funded by the Government of Canada’s Future Skills Centre (CCF), a pan-Canadian organization dedicated to “helping Canadians gain the skills they need to thrive in a changing labour market.” : https://fsc-ccf.ca 1
