The Coming Storm.
Canada boasts one of the most educated populations in the OECD. Yet, our productivity performance stubbornly lags behind that of our global peers—a paradox with far-reaching economic consequences.
The core issue is not whether Canadians are learning, but whether individuals’ capabilities are fully recognized, and whether people are truly equipped to adapt amid relentless workplace change.
Eight macro forces are fundamentally reshaping how human capital is developed and deployed in Canada. Meeting this challenge requires a bold, systemic response—one that unites policymakers, employers, learning providers, credentialing bodies, and learners in common cause:
Talent scarcity
The role of place
Declining trust
Automation
The 50-year working life
The shift from jobs to competencies
Risk management in hiring
The rise of contingent labour
The Human Capital Ecosystem.
Human capital is not simply an individual asset. It is developed, recognized, exchanged, and renewed through an ecosystem of relationships.
The Productivity Project focuses on five core stakeholders:
Individuals develop capabilities through education, work, community, and life experience.
Learning providers support certified, non-certified, experiential, and informal learning.
Credentialing bodies assess, verify, and recognize qualifications and competencies.
Policymakers shape the rules, incentives, funding, and infrastructure of the system.
Employers hire, develop, deploy, and retain people in ways that affect productivity.
No single stakeholder can solve the productivity challenge alone.
The Future is Open.
Canada’s learning system extends beyond public post-secondary education. People develop capabilities through formal credentials, non-certified training, workplace learning, volunteering, self-directed learning, mentorship, and life experience.
Open learning recognizes this full ecosystem. It asks how regions can connect diverse learning pathways to trusted recognition, labour-market demand, and productivity outcomes.
Towards open recognition
Open recognition separates how someone learns from how their competency is assessed. It focuses on evidence of what a person can do, not only where or how they learned it.
This creates a more flexible, inclusive, and productivity-oriented system for workers, employers, learning providers, and policymakers.
