Skill Shortages Are Here: How Are You Going to Fill the Gap?

Global Context, Local Realities

In a globalized marketplace, demand for skilled workers is already becoming highly competitive and will only become more intense. Canada must maximize the talents and innovations of its existing workforce. The shortage of skilled workers coupled with an aging workforce make the challenge of meeting labour demands even more pressing. The Conference Board of Canada predicts 1 million job vacancies in the next 20 years and the skills shortages will be particularly acute in areas such as healthcare and teaching. In fact, within the next 5 years, all of Ontario’s net new labour force growth will come from immigration and this opportunity needs to be tapped into, if your organization is to continue growing with the times.

Newcomers to Canada

In 2006, over 138,000 people with post secondary education arrived in Canada - an annual figure that has remained constant over the past decade according to Statistics Canada. Indeed, Canadian employers’ access to a robust skilled workforce through immigration is one competitive advantage over those in other countries. Yet many highly educated and skilled immigrants face limited employment prospects after arriving in Canada, partly because employers are stuck trying to understand foreign credentials in Canadian terms. RBC Financial Group’s 2005 economic case for diversity reports the cost of not fully integrating immigrants in the workplace adds up to billions in lost wages, productivity and output. They estimate that if foreign trained workers were successfully integrated into the Canadian workforce, personal incomes would be about $13 billion higher each year than at present (www.rbc.com/economics).

Is Your Company Ready to Hire Newcomers?

Given today’s global economy, labour shortages, and an aging workforce, hiring internationally educated applicants makes good business sense. However, your organization may feel reluctant about hiring someone whose international credentials and work experience you are unfamiliar with. Since employers lack the resources and expertise to assess the foreign qualifications of immigrants, they need to turn to a source they can rely upon. This is especially true for small to medium sized businesses who can least afford to take perceived risks in hiring foreign trained applicants.

Assessing a Candidate’s International Education

When you need to know if an applicant’s overseas university degree is the same as one earned in Canada, World Education Services (WES) is your solution. WES is an international not-for-profit organization, recognized and funded by the Ontario Government to assess educational qualifications, from high school up to graduate level earned in all countries outside of Canada.

Get a Quick Preview of their Educational Equivalency

One exciting new service offered by WES is the Preliminary Online Equivalency (POE) that enables an employer to quickly preview the credentials of internationally educated applicants and screen them into the recruitment process if they meet the educational requirements of the job. The POE service is fast, convenient, and user-friendly: multiple users at a location can access the service with one registration, and you can pay as you use the service, or purchase a subscription for as low as $10 per credential. However, because the POE is not based on actual documents submitted, it has no official status and therefore cannot be used as proof of degree authentication. For that, an official evaluation report must be obtained from WES. Applicants are encouraged to apply for an official WES credential evaluation in order to have the authenticity of their documents attested to. They can direct a second copy of their evaluation report to you.

Article sourced from Torontojobs.ca