You Are Not Your Job
You Are a Bundle of Skills
Français • May 22, 2025
Did you know?
- Traditional economic modelling ignores the collection of skills workers accumulate over their career, education, and training journey.
- Economists have had to assume skills supply is only defined by the requirements of one’s current occupation, an obvious undercalculation since skills evolve over time.
- Signal49 Research is overcoming this inherent shortcoming by modelling career pathways—keeping a history of skills and adjusting their levels based on a separate skills framework.
- The skills framework models how skills are gained, maintained, and lost over one’s career, providing a more nuanced and accurate picture of the labour market.
Faulty foundations of skills supply forecasting
Workers build their skill sets through their education, training, and careers. Yet, models that traditionally forecast labour supply overlook the skills and experiences accumulated over an individual’s unique career pathway. In these models, the skills you bring to the market are fully defined by the demands of your current job. That’s it, that’s all.
The entirety of forecasting the supply of skills in Canada and around the world is built on this faulty foundation. We need to do better.
Supplying your labour is supplying your skills
High-level labour supply forecasts rely on metrics such as demographic trends, net migration, workforce age distribution, and broader labour market conditions. However, forecasting labour supply for a specific sector, occupation, or region is more challenging because people have at least some ability to move across all of these dimensions.
The reality is this: At an occupational level, labour supply is intrinsically linked to skills supply.
The labour that you supply is characterized by the skills you bring, which may align with—but are not strictly defined by—your job or your employment status.
Therein lies the critical juncture between labour market realities and existing skills supply forecasts. In current forecasts, the supply of a particular skill is only tied to the employment levels in jobs that require that skill.
Skills forecasting in Canada
In Canada, skills are typically linked to occupations through the Occupational and Skills Information System (OaSIS). While many skills taxonomies exist, OaSIS is the only official, made-in-Canada skill taxonomy. OaSIS defines a skill profile for each occupation in the National Occupational Classification (NOC).
Workers are treated like hard drives reformatted between jobs
When individuals enter a new occupation, their skills profile is identical to the skills profile of that occupation, disregarding any skills gained through education or prior work experience. Worse, if they leave the labour force, they are assigned skills equivalent to only their last job, if at all.
Effectively, workers are treated like hard drives who completely reformat their memories when they leave their jobs. This flawed assumption leads to systemic mischaracterization of labour and skills supply in the Canadian labour market.
How do career switches affect skills supply?
Imagine you are a paramedic and, after some time, you decide to pursue a slightly different path as a registered nurse (RN)—still in the field of health, focused on helping people through medical and related issues.
The two roles are quite similar in the OaSIS skills framework. A paramedic, however, requires higher “Equipment and Tool Selection” skills—level 3 out of 5 in OaSIS—than an RN (level 2). Additionally, paramedics are expected to have level 1 skills in “Preventative Maintenance” for machinery and equipment, whereas this is not required for RNs. These differences make sense. Paramedics are always mobile, attending to emergencies, and would need some basic knowledge on maintaining emergency care equipment such as defibrillators.
If you change careers from a paramedic to an RN, do you immediately forget how to maintain defibrillators? Very unlikely. Yet, current forecasting models assume you do—erasing those additional equipment maintenance skills from the supply of labour as soon as you change jobs.
Skills supply should be tied to you, not your job
Skills-to-occupation matching is crucial in forecasting labour supply, and considering only the skills required in your current occupation drastically alters labour supply outlooks. To ensure accurate matches, skills supply should reflect career pathways.
Structural shifts in the labour market, such as those triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, demonstrate the value of a career-path-driven approach.
During the pandemic, job losses were concentrated in occupations in the food service and accommodations industry, causing the skills profiles of these workers to disappear from labour supply forecasts as employment levels declined. However, these workers still have those skills—the models just failed to capture them as part of the existing supply.
Defining the supply of skills by education and career pathways of individuals, or groups of individuals, ensures that skills profiles are retained amid transitory periods of job loss, unemployment, or underemployment.
Rebuilding the foundation of skills supply forecasting
Signal49 Research is developing a framework centered on the career pathway, effectively untethering skills from occupations. To provide a more nuanced and accurate picture of the labour market and skills distribution across various career pathways, we are modeling two key elements: career transitions and skill shifts.
The model retains skills information from an individual’s unique career, education, and training journey. Moreover, it monitors how individuals gain, maintain, and even lose skills over time. As a result, it will provide a more complete profile of the skills supply in the Canadian labour market.
A tool to support evidence-based policy
By centering forecasts around career pathways, we offer an innovative tool for policy-makers and career development professionals to address skill imbalances. For example, using the model, policy-makers can assess how initiatives aimed at mid-career retraining in specific fields might impact skills shortages.
We believe this new approach will revolutionize our understanding of the true supply of skills in Canada and will inspire a stronger evidence-based labour policy.
Stay informed and contact Brittany Feor for email updates on future events and reports on this exciting project.
FSC partners
The responsibility for the findings and conclusions of this research rests entirely with Signal49 Research.