by thomas carey
In this three-part post, I offer my reflections on the discussion paper Building a Modern 21st Century Workforce prepared for Fall 2024 consultations led by the Government of Canada’s Minister of Workplace Development. These reflections are based on experiences by our team within the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada, around our mission to foster collaborations with workplace and higher education partners to advance employee-led innovation in Canadian workplaces.
In each of the three posts in this series, I will focus on one topic within Strategic Workforce Development which are explored in the discussion paper:
Better integration of workforce development efforts to build a more diverse and inclusive workforce (in this post)
Developing a distinctive role for Canada in Workplace Innovation Skills for the emerging workforce needs of Industry 5.0 (Part II, January 2025)
Place-based Inclusive Innovation approaches to foster more innovative workforces in regional contexts (Part III, February 2025 )
The highlighted excerpts below are from Building a Modern 21st Century Workplace and are followed by brief reflections and insights from our work.
Strategic workforce development approaches must address both current and anticipated future needs…Efforts must be focused on the following groups of workers to drive growth and productivity:
Maximizing participation: Growing the workforce from within Canada
Inclusion of all Canadians who want to work is a priority…This includes providing support to employers to help them foster more inclusive workplaces and employee engagement, and offering wraparound supports tailored to individual needs to remove barriers…
Equipping new entrants to meet on-the-job demands: ensuring job seekers are ready to work… Canada has strong foundations with K-12, post-secondary education, and work-integrated learning initiatives geared toward better school-to-work transitions…
Newcomers are essential to Canada’s workforce…Newcomers are still more likely to be unemployed than Canadian-born adults, even after other factors such as skill levels are considered.
Improving skills availability by upskilling and reskilling the existing workforce
To enable workers and employers to keep up with shifting skills demands within shorter cycles of change, increased attention is being placed on supporting skills upgrading and retraining so that individuals can make the most of opportunities.
This includes supporting mid-career workers who are in sectors in transition as well as those who are unemployed and actively looking for work so they can develop skills needed to pursue new opportunities…
Our Reflections – Linking Workplace Inclusion and Workplace Innovation
Our colleagues in the EU’s Workplace Innovation Network have been at the forefront of research and practice in Workplace Innovation. They have been intrigued by the way we have brought together the concepts of Workplace Inclusion and Workplace Innovation, through the made-in-Canada concept of Inclusive Workplace Innovation. At the heart of this linkage is a well-known principle of innovation: more diverse innovation teams are more likely to create breakthrough innovations.
Enhancing Capability and Inclusion for New Workplace Entrants: For example, we’ve shared with EUWIN colleagues the dual impacts of Inclusive Workplace Innovation being explored by one of our partner academic programs, through the design of a Work-Integrated Learning option in which students can support workplace partners seeking to “make your innovation initiatives more inclusive and your inclusion initiatives more innovative”.
We are also noticing that developing capability for workplace innovation in non-vocational B.A. programs can lead students to be more open to considering careers in industry sectors like Advanced Manufacturing, which in the past would have been perceived as routine-driven work and thus of limited appeal. They are starting to discover how the Ways of Knowing in the Liberal Arts can prepare them to serve as enablers of workplace innovation, using human-centric work design to leverage new technologies like collaborative robotics and generative AI.
The prospect of working as Enablers of Inclusive Workplace Innovation can thus open doors to new career opportunities for B.A. students who have traditionally been difficult to place in work-integrated learning. This has potential implications on Equity goals as well as Inclusion; e.g., as noted in the Inclusive Innovation Action Plan for Canadian “innovation intermediary” Mitacs, students from equity-seeking groups have higher-than-average participation rates in B.A. programs.
Newcomers to Canada: Our experience suggests that many newcomers struggle with ‘Cultural Intelligence’ relative to Canadian workplace practices. In the case of international students, we’ve been part of a pilot program at the University of Windsor helping international students in Information Technology (and soon to include Engineering students) to understand what Canadian employers mean by the ubiquitous statement in job ads requiring “innovative employees”.
In the 2025 Summer term, the initial activities from 2024 will be upgraded into a Special Topics course including both employee-led workplace innovation and aspects of socio-centric and human-centric work design (in the contexts of Industry 5.0 and UN SDGs 8, 9 and 10).
Upskilling our existing workforce: As our past applied research with the Future Skills Centre attests, many Canadian employers – large and small – have expressed their need for a more innovation workforce, but struggle to move from a high level Goal around workplace innovation to specific Game Plans for their specific contexts (including training and support for employee-led workplace innovation that is aligned with research insights and exemplary practices).
We have worked with large employers – across both corporate and public sectors – and with SMEs to help bridge that research-to-practice gap in upskilling organizational and employee capability for workplace innovation. That work includes the following:
adaptations for working learners of our award-winning, research-informed learning resources to develop workplace innovation in higher education;
new approaches and resources to develop capability for the organizational role of Workplace Innovation Catalyst emerging from that past research;
an innovation-driven spin-off company focused on workforce upskilling, with an initial MVP prototype launching in Q2 2025;
partnering with the EU Workplace Innovation Network to develop Workplace Innovation Skills for Industry 5.0 (including a distinctive role for Canada as a global exemplar and North American leader, as outlined in Part II of this series);
integrating Inclusive Workplace Innovation into regional workforce development and regional innovation ecosystems (as described in Part III of this series).
about the author
Dr. Thomas Carey is Principal Catalyst for Academic Partnerships with the Workplace Innovation Network for Canada. He is also currently an Executive-in-Residence for Teaching and Learning Innovation at Monash University (Melbourne, Australia) and a Research Professor Emeritus at San Diego State University (California, U.S.). Tom was previously a Professor and Associate Vice-President at the University of Waterloo and a Visiting Scholar at IBM Canada’s Centre for Advanced Studies.