Businesses of all
sizes must get better at forecasting skill sets needs and
credentials
requirements for prospective employees - even though this may be difficult –
and
make the
requirements known to the federal government, the provincial
government,
universities,
colleges and professional societies so that they can set up appropriate
programs
to cater to
anybody looking for work, no matter what their personal circumstances and no
matter what stage
they are at in their careers.
In short, there
has to be more dialogue between the various players to vastly improve the
utilization of
people.
The well-known
difficulties for businesses in forecasting skill sets needs and credentials
requirements for
prospective future employees automatically mean that some mis-match
between the skill
sets of newly-trained people - versus what the employers need at the time –
is unavoidable.
Hence businesses
must recognize that some on-the-job training for new hires
is an unavoidable
necessity; in many cases this might be facilitated by removing the existing
restrictions on
who can access programs already referred to such as the Ontario Targeted
Wage Subsidy
(OTWS), Ontario Job Creation Partnerships (OJCP), and the new Ottawa Co-Op
program (set up
by Invest Ottawa).
Businesses and everybody
else must also be told to stop lecturing job seekers about
improvements to
“appearances” as if that was the only thing that matters. I mean resume
writing,
interview
technique, cut and colour of business suit, “body language”, certain words
that should NOT
appear in a resume, and so on.
We have a problem
in Canada with a “job-getting-advice-industry” that seeks to profit by endless
fiddling with the
rules of engagement between job seekers and employers, possibly involving
collusion with
employers to invent new “deficiencies” in job seekers’ approach that job
seekers
“…must now
address…” if they want jobs.
No amount of this
will alter the fact that if there are 800 applicants for one job (Paul
Swinwood, April
26th 2003), only one of the 800 will get it. Long ago, it got to the point of
being
counter-productive for employers as well as job seekers, as evidenced by:-
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/OttawaHiTech/conversations/messages/4594
“Some job
candidates getting too slick for interviewers”
By VIRGINIA GALT,
Globeandmail, Monday, Feb 7, 2005
More recently,
this problem of falsely-alleged “deficiencies” in job seekers’ approaches to
employers was
made clear in the Government of Ontario’s own October 2012 report:-
“Brighter
Prospects: Transforming Social Assistance in Ontario”