It鈥檚 risky business trying to tailor education and training programs to future demands of the labour market. Not trying to close the anticipated gap between jobs and skills would be a bigger risk.
The sa国际传媒 government鈥檚 Skills for Jobs Blueprint aims to ensure more training and education are aimed at filling high-demand occupations. The government anticipates the province will have one million job openings by 2022 and wants British Columbians to be first in line to fill those jobs.
The province doesn鈥檛 intend to increase the $7.5 billion a year it now spends on education and training, but will attach conditions to more of the funding. About 10 per cent of the funding is now targeted to specific programs. By the 2017-18 academic year, 25 per cent of the funding will be aimed at programs that train people for specific jobs such as the engineers, pipefitters and welders that will be required for the possible liquefied natural gas industry in northern sa国际传媒
The government will examine labour-market data to gauge where to direct funding. With no money coming in, re-allocation of money in favour of one program will deprive another. Still, 75 per cent of the funding will have no strings attached, so while liberal arts programs might have to be tightened a bit, they are not likely to disappear.
The plan appears to put a lot of eggs in the liquefied natural gas basket and a lot of faith in the government鈥檚 ability to predict what the future labour market will be. If the projected LNG boom doesn鈥檛 occur, or if the economy otherwise goes sour, a lot of technical professionals and tradespeople might be without the jobs anticipated in the government鈥檚 plan. But if that happens, they wouldn鈥檛 be any better off with philosophy or art history degrees, as far as employment is concerned.
Anyone embarking on education is, in essence, trying to predict what the future employment situation will be. There鈥檚 no iron-clad guarantee that a particular degree or certificate will result in a job when training is completed. But the odds are heavily in favour of those who study the trends and plan accordingly.
The Skills for Jobs plan aims to move further upstream by revamping the K-12 curriculum to direct more students toward the trades. That can be a hard sell, as going to university carries a certain prestige, while entering a trade is sometimes seen as the route for those who can鈥檛 cut it academically.
Respectable, rewarding and lucrative careers abound in the trades. Teachers and counsellors can do a disservice if they steer a student toward university if the student鈥檚 inclinations and potential lie elsewhere. They are different paths, not lesser or greater.
But care should be taken that the two paths do not diverge too widely. The Conference Board of sa国际传媒 lists a wide range of employability skills essential to all careers, such as communicating, analyzing and managing information, using numbers, problem-solving and people skills.
And taking one path should not preclude embarking on another. It鈥檚 good to have carpenters who know philosophy, and philosophers who know carpentry.
Nor should the pendulum swing too far to the point where someone feels the need to apologize for a liberal-arts degree. We will always need people who can make philosophical sense of the world around us, historians who know from the past what is likely to happen in the future and artists who can explain things in ways that don鈥檛 involve numbers and circuit boards.
The government might make mistakes along the way as it tries to match education to future employment needs, but it would be a huge mistake not to try.
