The Future of Education is Challenge-Driven

Canada’s big public policy questions—things like providing sustainable and affordable housing, ensuring food security, preparing for and preventing large natural disasters, designing cities and spaces that respect our environment, transitioning to clean energies, and taking care of an aging population—aren’t going away. 

These are our shared challenges, nationally and globally. The good news is that Canada has one of the strongest postsecondary sectors in the world. If we think strategically about the who, what, why, when, and how of learning, each challenge becomes a strategic opportunity for colleges and institutes as educators, partners, and innovators to be a bigger part of the solution.  

Economist and professor Dr. Mariana Mazzucato calls it challenge-driven innovation—the idea that well-defined goals focused on solving big challenges in society can help us prioritize, streamline, and pull together resources across sectors to develop solutions. In a world with seemingly more challenges and less money for public spending, those solutions are more needed than ever.

Investing in learning is essential. A challenge-driven approach means starting with the why.

Step 1: Identify Your Challenge

Take housing, for example. In 2022, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) reported that 1.4 million households in Canada don’t have access to quality housing. To restore affordability to the housing market, CMHC projected Canada would need to build an additional 3.45 million homes by 2030. Meanwhile, others suggest the real numbers are actually much higher. 

Canadians desperately need an answer. Some of the proposed solutions are a $4-billion accelerator fund, incentives for municipalities, and tax breaks for developers, to name a few. It’s clear that affordable housing is a nationwide challenge. But, if we reconceptualize what the challenge really is, it becomes easier to understand what system-wide solutions colleges and institutes can bring to the table.  

The How

In a very real sense, challenges like housing availability and affordability aren’t just about the money. They’re also about developing a workforce capable of meeting demand. Enter colleges and institutes.

Skilled trades workers build and maintain things like homes, schools, hospitals, roads, and other vital infrastructure. Without them, our economy would come to a standstill. It takes more than 30 different skilled trades and other occupations working on-site to build a typical home. The future of the housing sector in Canada needs designers, painters, plumbers, electricians, masons, roofers, and a lot of equipment.

Yet, a 2021 RBC Thought Leadership report revealed that Canada is facing a shortage of 10,000 tradespeople in nationally recognized Red Seal trades over the next five years. When factoring in 250 provincially recognized trades, the number grows tenfold. If we’re serious about meeting Canada’s housing challenges, these are the numbers we cannot ignore.

Preparation for these jobs comes directly from colleges and institutes, but we need to double down on public investment to create more opportunities within. British Columbia Institute of Technology’s School of Construction and the Environment, for example, offers over 90 programs and over 272 part-time courses, microcredentials, and customized training options in areas like civil engineering, construction management, ironworking, welding, and plumbing. At Nova Scotia Community College, students can learn trades like brick and stone masonry, drafting, pipefitting, and carpentry.  

Step 2: Find Out What the Market Needs

Beyond housing, many of the big workforce challenges of the past five years fall directly in the college and institute space. Their curriculum responds directly and in real-time to what Canadians need as employers and as learners. 

If we look back on the cannabis industry, within months of legalization, we saw a dozen colleges and institutes developing and implementing programs to train professionals in every aspect of the burgeoning industry. In the emerging tech sector, colleges and institutes offer almost 50 programs in AI, Big Data, data analytics, and machine learning. 

For Canada’s aging population, colleges and institutes offer research and training opportunities to improve the quality of life for seniors, including a national microcredential program to quickly address labour shortages in the long-term care sector. 

The What

Now, one of our biggest challenges is energy, sustainability, and green skills. The energy transition isn’t just about wind turbines and solar panels. It’s about fundamentally restructuring how we produce, use, store, and manage energy across all sectors—not just the natural resources sector. 

The Electricity Human Resources Council’s (EHRC) 2023 Electricity in Demand report identified areas like smart homes and smart cities, electrical vehicle integration, energy efficiency, and energy storage as key areas for increases in labour market demand in the next five years. The report highlighted investment in quantity and quality of labour as key strategies to make sure growth across the sector is sustainable. In other words, we need to train more people to work in the sector and ensure those workers have the right training and skills. 

The Bank of Canada Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Rogers also recently suggested in a major speech that by making sure that training and education teach Canadians the skills we need, we could help drive greater innovation and productivity and lower the risks of future inflation.

This is exactly the type of labour market demand that colleges and institutes respond to with their programming. Algonquin College, for example, is a long-time partner of Hydro Ottawa on the Powerline Technician Diploma Program. Algonquin College’s experienced instructors deliver academic components of the curriculum, and Hydro Ottawa employees provide practical instruction at their facilities, which helps students learn the trade by doing it with their own hands. In this case, colleges and institutes are responding directly to the real needs of employers and energy providers. 

At the Cégep de Saint-Jérôme, students can—quite literally—drive Canada’s green transition forward with the Electric Vehicle Technologies program. Students learn to work in key aspects of the burgeoning industry, from development and manufacturing to inspection, maintenance, and quality control. 

To make our energy and sustainability transition a success, we need to focus on what we are teaching on our big challenges in a way that addresses the quality of labour question. The other half is about quantity.

Step 3: Make It Accessible and Applied

The simple reality is that we need more workers to meet labour market demands brought on by these big challenges. Workers with college and institute credentials are essential. Yet, too often, the college and institute sector is challenged by public misconceptions and limitations on access. We must be better at reframing—with evidence—perceptions about skills training and skilled careers like trades. They are vital to each and every one of our communities. 

The reality is that colleges and institutes are relevant, informed by industry needs, and lead to highly skilled careers that are rewarding and well-paid. In fact, data from Statistics Canada shows that college- and institute-trained journeypersons in some construction-related fields, such as powerline technicians, crane operators, and industrial instrumentation and control technicians, can earn upwards of $100,000 per year. In short, colleges and institutes help people build the employment-focused skills they need to thrive immediately in the workforce. This type of learning is increasingly happening in an applied research environment. 

For example, SAIT’s Green Building Technologies Access Centre works with construction industry partners to develop, implement, and commercialize environmentally friendly technologies, processes, systems, and services that can change the way we build residential and industrial spaces. 

College- and institute-led applied research not only helps us find solutions to our housing and climate challenges, but for students, working on an applied research project gives them an inside look at their industry, allowing them to apply the skills learned in the classroom to real-world scenarios and start building their professional toolbox. In 2021-2022, 27,000 students contributed to applied research projects at college and institute laboratories and research centres.

The Who

It’s important that more Canadians—and newcomers to Canada—have the opportunity to contribute meaningfully to our economy and help solve these big challenges. That means programming needs to be flexible, accessible, and provide quick results to improve or transform skills, particularly for groups that are traditionally underrepresented in postsecondary education.

Step 4: Invest in Teaching and Learning as a Solution to Our National Challenges

Colleges and institutes add over $190B to Canada’s economy each year and contribute to inclusive economic growth by working with industry and community partners to offer more than 10,000 programs to learners in urban, rural, remote, and northern communities. Lack of funding is an existential threat to that economic impact. Yet, as a country, we have not significantly increased public funding for colleges and institutes in the last ten years. 

Colleges and institutes are publicly supported institutions. That means the way they receive funding shapes what they can do, as opposed to private organizations that are shaped by customers. When public debates arise—like what we’re currently having on the topic of sustainable growth in international students—they often turn the conversation away from the real challenges. 

The future of education is challenge-driven. If we frame the who, what, why, and how of investing in learning around our big challenges, each one becomes an opportunity for colleges and institutes as educators, partners, and innovators to be a bigger part of the solution.  

The when means now.