The social and economic importance of encouraging adults to engage in continuous learning throughout their working lives is undisputed. Better-educated individuals earn higher wages, have greater earnings growth over their lifetimes, and experience less unemployment. Better-educated nations have higher long run economic growth and higher standards of living.
But all too often, lifelong learning simply means those who are already highly educated are getting even more education and training (the exemplar par excellence of the ‘rich getting richer’). New evidence suggests that adult learning and raising literacy skills have the potential to significantly improve the economic wellbeing of those with relatively low initial education and skills. When learning is diffused throughout the less-educated members of the workforce, national prosperity is significantly enhanced.
Canada is generally recognized as having, on average, a high level of educational attainment. However, the adult learning participation rate of the least educated Canadian adults is quite low by international standards and has scarcely improved in five years. Many observers have pinned the problem on adult learning systems that are complex, incoherent and incomplete.
This report documents the availability of formal learning opportunities for adults, and identifies the factors that influence participation of less-educated/less-skilled adults in these opportunities. In addition, it identifies gaps in our adult learning systems and recommends measures to fill these gaps. While a truly comprehensive study would examine all provinces, this report examines the situation primarily in five provinces: Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec.
A large proportion of Canada’s adult population is not equipped to participate in a knowledge-based society:
Less-educated individuals are likely to experience relatively poor labour market outcomes over the entire course of their career, in the form of lower wages, a higher likelihood of unemployment, and lowerstatus jobs. Differences in labour market outcomes based on education take effect early in a workers’ career, and persist throughout their lives. In fact, the leasteducated will likely fall farther behind their more-educated counterparts over the course of their careers, as ‘learning begets learning’– those with high initial levels of education are more likely to take advantage of future educational and training opportunities, and reap the rewards in the form of better, higher-paying jobs. The difference in labour market outcomes between the least-educated and their more educated counterparts has become larger in the past 20 years.