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:-
“Some
job candidates getting too slick for interviewers”
By
VIRGINIA GALT, Globeandmail, Monday, Feb 7, 2005
NOTE. This was
on the Yahoo Groups Ottawahitech website until December 2019, when Yahoo Groups
removed all content fro this and other Yahoo Groups web sites.
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”