opportunity in changing #demographics and #education

Here are my abstract ideas on changing demographics and education which were sparked by this report from stats Canada. Page 20 if you wish to follow along. http://www.statcan.gc.ca/pub/91-551-x/91-551-x2010001-eng.pdf

The change in demographic composition, and particularly the influx of the immigrants in their prime working age in the next 20 years will have various impacts on Canadian society, whether they are good or bad is up to everyone to decide and is going to vary vastly. I feel like since this influx is going to be coming from Asian countries where education is highly sought after. It would support the inflation of education. It’s already felt that bachelors’ degree is nothing really special, and a master’s degree is almost expected for the really high paying jobs. Having people come to Canada with those sought after degrees will only raise the bar for the rest of the workforce.

I find that the employers approach to degrees right now is very general in most scenarios. They would only be looking if the degree was completed and then they put a checkmark to the candidate file. That is understandable in a way since the degrees are run of the mill sort of speak, but it’s not conductive of true competition on the labor market, especially with the new immigrants. They are facing so many obstacles (from culture, to language, to Canadian experience requirement) coming into a new country, which often people get lost in the shuffle and the society doesn’t get to reap the benefits of all the skills that are available out there. Employers often don’t know how to assess the candidate’s file if it has foreign experience and foreign education.

I support the idea of creating a centralized way to verify the credentials of the immigrants that can rate and summarize the obtained experience and that can be trusted by employers during the hiring decision. This could also be used for various degrees around Canada, which would provide a central benchmark for the credentials that are obtained by students.

It has to be used on voluntary bases by the candidates kind of like TOEFL tests that assess language proficiency. This would embrace the global workforce reality and hopefully put the most qualified and appropriate people in available jobs.