SKILLS: Details of changes are still being worked out by province
the former chair of Skills Ontario said.
“I’ve had anecdotal discussions with some peers and colleagues who said ‘Oh, my son was looking at this but I talked them out of it, because I think they should go to engineering school, because they don’t get paid as much or I thought it was too dirty or not safe enough’ That’s so wrong. If you look at just the stats, there’s just so much opportunity,” he said.
With these changes, the province also hopes to encourage more young women to pursue trade careers. Although nearly 39 per cent of Ontario secondary school students were enrolled in a technological education course in 202021, nearly 63 per cent were male students.
According to the Statistics Canada report, in Canada, women made up 2.4 per cent of working-age apprenticeship certificate holders in the three fields in 2021, while racialized persons represented just seven per cent, despite being over a quarter of the entire population.
Getting more people from these groups that are underrepresented in the trades interested in that career path will help solve the employee shortage, Howcroft explained.
“We need to encourage and support people from those groups to get into it to deal with a skill shortage. What we’re looking at saying, well, we need to perhaps go in and provide girls with more information, perhaps provide them with mentors, experiences, showcase what other women have done to access a skilled trade, and find out what it’s all about,” Howcroft said.
“We know that to be fully inclusive and really build the workforce we need we have to get to those underrepresented groups,” he added.
Spector agreed, noting that the Indigenous population is the fastest-growing demographic in Canada.
“We’re not tapping into the untapped pools of young women and Indigenous [people]. Yet we’re complaining about a skilled trade shortage. Because you keep going back to the same pool, the typical, male demographic, and it’s a very small pool to pick from,” he said.