Miana Plesca
Assistant Professor of Economics
University of Guelph
Fraser Summerfield
PhD candidate
University of Guelph
Miana Plesca: So our research looked at the demand and the supply for skill, and our main finding is that there’s not a problem with the supply of skill. It’s not a shortage of skill, but a mismatch. We looked both at the supply for skill and the demand for skill and then we put it together.
And in terms of the supply of skill, we were looking at: how does the skill get produced?
Fraser Summerfield: What we find is that there is a sustained demand for higher education skills, for cognitive type skills and that demand itself may have a cyclical component, and so an important element in mismatch is the cyclicality of that demand for skill.
Miana Plesca: We were also thinking in terms of the transferability of skills, so we want the modern labour force to have general transferable skills rather than narrow specific skills which [make it] harder to move from one occupation to another. We think that the modern knowledge economy is built on to critical thinking skills, and we are trying to see to what extent are they built by universities or community colleges or what role do apprenticeships have in all this building of transferable versus specific skills.
We want a policy that fosters job creation that needs highly skilled type of individuals and Canada will move forward more productively.