Canada's Labour Market Training System by Bob Barnetson

Author:Bob Barnetson [Barnetson, Bob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Business & Economics, Labor, Labor & Industrial Relations, Political Science
ISBN: 9781771992411
Google: Dal8DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 42670830
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
Published: 2018-11-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Workplace Training and Learning

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you will be able to:

Identify the three main perspectives on labour relations and explain how they affect workplace training and learning.

Define and critically assess the concepts of human capital theory, learning organizations, and skills and competencies.

Evaluate workplace training in terms of access to, control of, and benefit from training.

According to a report by job networking website LinkedIn, job-hopping by college-educated American millennials is on the rise.1 The solution, says Professor Jason Wingard, dean of Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies, is training. “By investing in corporate learning, employers have the power to address millennial retention in three key areas: talent attraction; job readiness; and culture change.”2 Before we buy into the “more training” mantra proposed by Wingard, it is worthwhile to tease apart whether these articles about workplace training are accurate.

Our first question should be whether the LinkedIn report’s conclusion about job-hopping is correct. The LinkedIn report sits at odds with a longitudinal study of job tenure by the US Department of Labor that suggests workers are, on average, staying with firms longer.3 To be fair, the danger of using national statistics is that they can wash out differences among subpopulations (e.g., the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada). Given this, it is possible that college-educated millennials (who graduated between 2001 and 2010) are job-hopping more than older workers did after they graduated.

Looking at the LinkedIn report itself reveals numerous methodological issues. The two most obvious problems are these:

1. The report’s dataset are jobs reported on LinkedIn profiles. This data is not necessarily valid. For example, older respondents (who are the comparator group) may have under-reported short-term jobs at the beginning of their careers due to memory decay, irrelevance, or a desire to make their careers appear focused and stable.

2. The dataset is not representative of the total population of college-educated workers. It includes only college-educated workers who use LinkedIn. So our ability to generalize the experiences of this sample to the overall population is limited.

The report acknowledges (and even tries to cope with) these issues in the methodological fine print at the end of the article. But these profound methodological problems don’t temper the report’s claims, and that should make us cautious about accepting them. Now let’s consider Wingard’s prescription of greater investment in corporate training: “Millennials want to know whether they will have the opportunity to develop a strong set of competencies and transferable skills that can not only be useful now, for their current employer, but in the future, as well, as their careers advance.”4

This may well be true. But will it reduce the rate of job-hopping? The question that neither the LinkedIn report nor the Wingard article engages is whether job-hopping behaviour (which may or may not be increasing) is a worker choice or is driven by the greater job precarity facing millennials. If job-hopping is by choice, that behaviour may (or may not) be something that companies can influence by providing more training (assuming that a lack of training is driving the behaviour).

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