Labour Market Matters - November 2013

Individuals who enter the labour market with relatively low levels of education often find that they lack the necessary human capital and credentials needed to adapt to the rapidly changing labour market in Canada. The severe recession of the early 1980s and early 1990s coupled with the restructuring in the labour market caused by the introduction of the US-Canada Free Trade Agreement, the North American Free Trade Agreement, the High Tech Meltdown in the early 2000s and the recent Financial Crisis have also had major implications for job security. Mid-career investments in both human capital and credential acquisition in this context may be increasingly important for workers to both retain stable employment and receive a suitable return for their work. A CLSRN paper entitled “Does Adult Training Benefit Canadian Workers?†(CLSRN Working Paper no. 124) by Wen Ci, José Galdo, Marcel Voia, and Christopher Worswick (all of Carleton University) estimate the causal impacts of employer supported course enrollment and mid-career investments in formal education on wages. Skills such as literacy, document use and numeracy are often considered to be basic “Foundational Skills†that are essential building blocks towards success in the labour market. For unemployed adults, it is believed that improvement of such foundational skills through Adult Learning programs can be helpful toward the improvement of labour market outcomes for such individuals. The Foundations Workplace Skills Program (FWSP) is a small-scale adult learning intervention program delivered at no charge by Douglas College to unemployed workers in Surrey, British Columbia. The program was designed to help develop broadly applicable, general skills – particularly for the facilitation of long-term labour force integration and attachment. A study entitled “An analysis of a foundational learning program in BC: the Foundations Workplace Skills Program (FWSP) at Douglas College†(CLSRN Working Paper no. 123) by David Grey and Louis-Philippe Morin (both of the University of Ottawa) analyzes the workings of the FSWP intervention by investigating three measured and observed outcomes for the participants of the FSWP program: i) a return to work, ii) a return to school, and iii) an improvement in the score obtained from the Test of Workplace Essential Skills (TOWES) that gauges literacy and essential skills.