Workplace Skills Strategy Overview

Our vision is a Canada where:

• Individual Canadians have many opportunities to acquire and develop the skills they need in their working lives and to contribute to their communities.
• Employers across the country are investing in the skills and education of their workers.
• Canada has a growing economy and a quality of life second to none, thanks to partnerships between the federal government and provinces and territories, and with stakeholders, based on a shared, skills and learning agenda.

Canada has one of the best standards of living in the world. But to sustain and advance our standard of living we cannot stand still.

Canada’s success, and the success of individual Canadians, relies on our economic productivity. And our productivity, in turn, is increasingly dependent on skills and learning.

In response to these challenges, the Government of Canada is implementing a Workplace Skills Strategy (WSS), a key pillar of the government’s overall economic strategy.

The WSS is the first element of the Government of Canada’s five-point strategy to build a more globally competitive and sustainable economy (link to SFT, October 2004).

The WSS has three main goals:

• To help Canadians be the best trained, most highly skilled workers in the world
• To build a labour market that is flexible and efficient
• To respond to the needs of employers to make Canadian workplaces more productive and innovative

To continue to prosper as a nation, we must develop value-added activities that focus on innovation, research, and worker skills and qualifications. The Workplace Skills Strategy will do this by:

• promoting workplace skills investment
• promoting skills recognition and utilization
• promoting partnerships, networks and information

For additional information, please view the Workplace Skills Strategy Backgrounder.