Mr. Chair and honourable members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to speak here today.
I'm Val Walker, and I'm the CEO at the Business and Higher Education Roundtable, BHER.
We're the only organization in Canada that brings together leaders from the country's top companies and post-secondary institutions to work on critical issues together to create a better social and economic future.
As Canada's leading cross-sectoral convenor and driver of change, we collaborate with our members to tackle some of the country's biggest skills, talent, innovation and productivity challenges.
Since 2019, we've played a critical role in helping post-secondary institutions and businesses create work experiences for students before they finish school. With federal support starting in 2019, we at BHER and our funded partners have created more than 70,000 work-integrated learning opportunities for students. We've created more than 100 partnerships and built an employer network of nearly 12,000 companies across the country, so we know what works on the ground.
Today, we're here to talk about the challenges young people are facing when it comes to accessing employment. Behind the current crisis-level numbers are young people doing a lot of things right. They're earning credentials, they're gaining skills and they're working hard to find work, but they're still struggling for that first and lasting foothold in the labour market.
At the same time, we know for certain that employers need talent, especially in big fields like AI, health care, the skilled trades and the energy sector, to name only a few. At BHER, we know that connecting young people to employers early and getting them experience and exposure—not just to work, but to how work works—is the most effective way to create career pathways for young people and to build the skilled talent pipelines that enable Canada's businesses to be productive, be innovative and grow.
I'll focus here on three practical actions to turn around our current challenge with youth unemployment and widen the on-ramps to work for every young person in Canada.
The first is to help youth name and prove their skills. Give young people simple tools to identify and describe what they can do. For example, at post-secondary institutions, every course or program should include plain language skills statements so learners can point to the exact skills they have, rather than vague course titles. Well-designed microcredentials do this already. Our friends and collaborators at eCampusOntario are leading the charge on this in Ontario and on behalf of the federal government by connecting users of Canada's job bank to microcredentials at accredited public post-secondary institutions.
On the employer side of things, they should focus job postings on skills—not just credentials or job titles—that help young people see themselves in the job and show their value faster and help employers spot talent sooner.
The second is to guide youth to where there's the biggest demand for jobs. Targeted workforce development means clear, guided pathways to real jobs. Young people need to see a six- or 12-month opportunity map by region and sector, including openings, wages and skills. We can then distribute those maps through schools, post-secondary institutions and job platforms so youth can see where work is growing and where opportunities are.
On the post-secondary side, they can convert those signals into two- to three-step routes from a microcredential to a short work placement to an entry-level job. Employers should be co-creating these programs and paid experiences with post-secondaries tied specifically to vacancies, demand and growth. They should also be investing in supervisor training and flexible schedules and sharing quarterly demand data, ideally through organizations like ours.
The third, and most important, is to make work-integrated learning the default on-ramp to jobs. Work-integrated learning, WIL, is more than just co-ops and internships; it's short projects, microconsulting, hackathons and case competitions, but it can also be improved employee onboarding or on-the-job upskilling. This is critical. Through WIL, young people learn how work works, employers get early access to talent and, in our programs, two-thirds of employers report productivity gains as a result of their student.
The challenge is, like my fellow witness has said, there's not enough access to WIL yet, so how do we solve this? We need more flexible programming within our post-secondary institutions. This means more short-cycle work experiences and, where possible, flipping the balance between in-class and on-the-job training. Apprenticeship-style learning can't just be for the skilled trades anymore.
Maybe most importantly, to reach the goal of getting every student work experience before they graduate so they can be secure in that first job, Canada needs the largest employers at the table. It needs the kinds of companies BHER works with. The challenge here is that these companies come for scale and simplicity and they don't come for wage subsidies.
In closing, what we're looking at is partnership and capacity building between post-secondaries and industry. The bottom line is that when businesses and post-secondaries partner, we create more opportunities for young people and our productivity rises. That's what we were built to do. That's what we're here to help you do.
I would be very happy to answer any questions.
Thank you, Mr. Chair.