Meeting Skill Requirements: Report of the Human Resources Survey

Karl Burak was a solicitor in North Vancouver, B.C.

This study of data obtained from a human resources survey by the Economic Council of Canada in 1979 (which was published as a summary guide, Skills and Shortages, in September 1980) is not the tool for employers, counsellors, and planners that the human resources survey itself may have been. It will be of greater and largely academic interest to economists, statisticians, and teachers — generally persons and groups not concerned with immediate practical impacts. There is an unfortunate lapse of time between the human resources survey and this publication in 1982.

The work is well planned. Starting with an overview of the areas to be canvassed, it proceeds with a statistical review, necessarily limited by imbalances identified in the survey, of the incidence of skill shortages and demands for skills. There is a discussion of the methods of adjustment to skill shortages in the marketplace, a review of programs designed to identify and develop sources of skilled labour, and finally recommendations to meet skill requirements in Canada.

The message is necessarily in part a restatement of the human resources survey and in part editorial comment by the author. We are told that some industries curtailed production in 1977-79 (despite substantial levels of general unemployment) due to shortages of skilled labour. This is because employers will provide adequate training in the short term, but will not provide training over longer periods unless the resulting skill is specific to the employer. Many jobs in transportation, communication, utilities, trade, and construction require skills which take time to acquire and so go unfilled. For these jobs employers tend to pay relatively little and are unlikely to provide adequate training. Unsurprisingly, the study advocates adjustment strategies whose goal is “the development of more comprehensive skill packages.”

There is one other aspect of this study that may bear mention, and this concerns the form in which it is written. There are places where editing might improve the text. It may be in the nature of statistical analysis to write in polyparenthetical expressions, but much could be said differently and sound better. The following sentence is an example of the language as it appears in the study: “Small firms, in particular, are unlikely, by themselves, to institute long term training and, as a result, any inducement programs should be designed to be attractive to these enterprises.”