Certification and standards

Joint support for certification and standards can make skills more portable and steps to further education or training clearer. The hospitality industry, for example, has achieved some success in this area and provides a model for other labour market partners.

All labour market partners must continue to educate themselves about the world of work and what it will probably be in the future, not on what it was in the past.

Education, skills identification, and development are critical elements for any worker. Certification and standards clarify the situation for each worker and encourage growth. The skills we have today may not be the ones we need tomorrow.

The perspective of women

The need for relevance and coherence

The present transition system reinforces women's poverty and their participation in low-paying occupations and presents formidable barriers to sequential learning and employment. Women are finding employment, but they are remaining in the occupations traditionally associated with women.

Enrollment and graduation figures of both community colleges and universities show that women are predominantly in the "female" fields of health, social sciences, and education. Similar patterns of representation are reflected in the number of women faculty members in both community colleges and universities. In the labour force, women are significantly concentrated in the clerical, sales, and service occupations. Representation is lowest in manufacturing, transportation/utilities, trade/finance, physical science, and engineering (Winning with Women in Trades, Technology, Science and Engineering, Report of the National Advisory Board on Science and Technology, Ottawa, 1993).

In spite of women's relatively equal participation (numerically) in the labour market, they tend to be poorer, have more family responsibilities, have less confidence, have been exposed to a narrower range of skills and options in the school system, experience larger gaps in their employment history, have fewer options for learning English or French as a second language, and experience more violence and discrimination.