The concept of employability

Transition into employment is a process. Its success depends on a complex set of factors, including characteristics of the labour market as well as those of individuals. The concept of employability captures what is at stake in the transition process. The Task Force defines employability as: the relative capacity of an individual to achieve meaningful employment, given the interaction between personal characteristics and the labour market.

Building a successful model for transition into employment implies bringing together, in a coherent framework, all of the elements affecting employability: education, training, counselling, prior learning and skills assessment, labour market information, hiring and separation practices, work organization, equity, human resources planning, and employer-employee relations.

It also implies considering all of the stakeholders in the transition process and how they interact with each other: families, peers, governments, Canada Employment Centres (CECs), organizations providing education and training, counsellors, communities, social and community agencies, employers, and labour unions.

In a coherent system, the interactions between stakeholders tend to compliment each other. In an incoherent one, the individual is confused, and this often leads to inefficient allocation of resources, both human and financial.

The Canadian context

Before making any recommendations, we reviewed a number of studies describing the Canadian labour market environment. We found many of these studies to be flawed as they did not always adequately account for visible minority or aboriginal participation in the workforce.

Diversity is a fundamental feature of Canadian society -- we have an aging population, an uneven population distribution across a wide geographic area, and citizens of many different racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds. A Canadian model for transitions has to take all of these realities into account.