In partnership with Evidence Consulting and First Work, the Employer Demand Driven Training Project has finished its first round of training and is currently undergoing its second round. Five employment centres throughout Ontario were invited as pilot sites for this research project, which seeks to measure the effectiveness of a slightly different model of employer engagement. Employers are asked what types of soft skills they require, and then youth are trained in those soft skills while trying their hand at the job.
This two-and-a-half year endeavour included many rounds of consultations with experts and stakeholders and substantive literature reviews that shed light into what are the current employers’ needs and concerns. Below are the results from Round One.
Out of the 50 youth that have started the program in Round One, 37 youth were offered jobs at the end of training. In some cases, the business offered jobs even though they formally had no job openings. Also, employers generally found that there was a significant improvement in youth performance after the soft skills training. The employment centres that used the pilot program as a ‘stand-alone’ program found this training model to be very useful and that it would be a useful part of their employment services toolkit.
In one of the pilots, one employer was particularly impressed with the changes in youth after the soft skills training. The training, differently from others, was based on teaching soft skills by teaching emotional intelligence. This approach seemed to allow the training to assess and address the personal gaps in the participating youth’s soft skills inventory.
The employers recruited for this project also identified which soft skills are the most critical for which the training was targeted: retail, landscaping, hospitality, and senior care. Problem solving, punctuality, and conflict resolution were identified as the most important soft skills in their work environments.
As the second round of training gets underway, we will share more results with the network. The long-term goal of the Employer Demand Driven Training project is to meaningfully advance the Ontario youth employment policy, programming and investment by incurring a paradigm shift supply to demand, and increasing the buy-in for this shift among government departments, ministries and community champions. For more information about the Employer Demand Driven Training project, please contact the Evidence consulting team at info@evidenceconsulting.com.
First Work advocates for sustainable youth employment in Ontario. Together, we can build a better future for our youth.
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