CBJ JANUARY 2026

55 IT’S TIME FOR A NATIONAL SKILLS AND EXPERIENCE STRATEGY JANUARY 2026 « The Canadian Business Journal 54 economic recovery from the pandemic and long-term Canadian prosperity. Without an objective measure to quantify the skills demanded by labor markets, postsecondary institutions cannot accurately assess demand for critical skills. A team at Seneca has started to investigate using AI and machine-learning techniques to quantify both technical and soft skills acquired across its programs. The goal is to discover soft skills gaps and create soft skills pathways between programs. The work also explores the probability of job disruption due to computerization and generates actionable intelligence to identify soft skill gaps. The methodology uses Employment and Social Development Canada’s standard pan-Canadian skills taxonomy and is one example of how to establish a common measure of soft skills that can be used across academic institutions and industries. Part of the necessary shift is thinking about traditional postsecondary programs in a non- traditional way; that is, looking at the underlying skills and experiences within an academic program, quantifying these, and aligning them to job classification systems. This approach allows someone to not only bring their resume to a job interview but also provide a prospective employer with a tangible list of skills and work experience that relate to a specific position. A national skills and experience strategy would provide a common catalogue from which postsecondary educators could build curricula and students would graduate with foundational skills and literacies that are clearly articulated for employers to assess. When a learner graduates, there is no formal record of them ever acquiring these sought- after skills, along with their formal credential. Without a measure to quantify the amount of skills acquired by learners, labor markets cannot gauge the supply of these skills from academic institutions. The market for transferable skills remains opaque. This ultimately limits our ability to address skills gaps across sectors in a changing, struggling economy – during and after the pandemic. The systematic inability to formally articulate, teach and recognize soft skill drastically hampers shifts we need to make to develop and recognize human capital in the 21st century. Keith Monrose is Executive Director, Seneca International. Maurice Chang is Partner and Co-founder, Digital Shift.