Generational fairness has finally entered the mainstream, receiving official buy-in from the Government of Canada in its 2024 Budget.

With this year’s significant shift in budget theme, it is time for policy and industry leaders to tap into lifelong career development to support Canadian workforce transitions and advance a better Future of Work for Canadians of all ages.

Unlike other countries, career development is a hidden sector in Canada. This means an essential resource for improving Canadian job, productivity, education, and labour market outcomes is being overlooked.

Most Canadians and policymakers don't know that Canada has 40,000-60,000 career development professionals.[1]

A large majority of these professionals are involved in delivering services and programs that are funded by nearly $3 billion in Labour Market Transfers each year for individuals and employers to receive training, upskilling, employment supports, career counselling, and job search assistance.[2]

Despite these resources and investments, the trained professionals, experts, and trusted advisors within the formal field of career development are rarely consulted by leaders when setting policy and creating programs for workforce transitions.

Approaches to reskilling, upskilling, and industry transitions focus on which skills, occupations, technologies, and workers are needed. Meanwhile, attention to who will actually support Canadians during these transitions—and how these transitions will lead to rewarding lifelong and long-life careers—is missing. Canadians are expected to know how to move from one job to the next without guidance in changing labour markets.

Moreover, those billions of taxpayer dollars predominantly fund services and programs that only help Canadians once they have experienced a disruption or barrier to employment. This “fail-first approach” to career and employment services does not proactively set up Canadians of all ages for success. The system waits for a problem, then reacts.

What if we prevented employment disruptions in the first place, much the same way healthcare doesn’t only focus on treating acute conditions, and instead we invested in the individual’s overall well-being to prevent emergencies from occurring in the first place?[3]

Canada is well-known and influential in the international career development landscape. Our sector leaders actively contribute to the research, best practices, and advancement of the field across borders.

Canadians have been instrumental in the founding of global organizations, such as the International Centre for Career Development and Public Policy (ICCDPP). The Canadian Career Development Guidelines and Standards and more recent Pan-Canadian Competency Framework for Career Development Professionals are often cited or used as models by other countries in initiatives to professionalize career services.[4]

Why is this deep well of expertise not being better leveraged here at home? Why are grassroots efforts to professionalize with a strong evidence-base and career services ecosystem going unnoticed?

To successfully help every generation get ahead, Canada needs to value lifelong career development as a public good. The scope of priority issues must expand beyond policies about jobs and skills, workforces and labour markets, and education to include a strategic focus on developing Canadians’ careers at all ages and stages of their lives.


We, the undersigned, urge you to:

• Convene a multi-interest holder summit to set the foundation for a national careers strategy and measure the readiness of Canada’s career development sector.
• Formally recognize the career development sector as a professionalized field whose members are critical to navigating workforce transitions and labour market fluctuations.
• Understand the impact that Canada’s “fail-first” approach to career development has on key labour, skills, employment, and education priorities for Canadians of all ages.
• Collaborate with the sector to explore and implement evidence-based solutions.
• Develop a framework for measuring the impact and maturity of career development ecosystems that can be adopted across provincial and territorial jurisdictions.
• Create a taskforce to ensure that sector, industry, and government associations and bodies consider lifelong career development in major programs and initiatives.
• Facilitate collaboration and partnership between this taskforce and the proposed federal council on generational fairness.[7]

We applaud the Government of Canada’s commitment to building generational fairness. It is shrewd, ambitious, and future-focused. But one budget won’t solve our systemic problems.

By transitioning away from a reactionary, “fail-first” approach to accessing the robust career development sector, Canada's economy, productivity, and competitiveness can thrive. The Canadian taxpayer dollars invested in providing career services can be used more efficiently and effectively. Workers can be less afraid of technology stealing their jobs. Industries can transition to green and fair economies without dire labour shortages. Small business owners can have strategies to recruit and retain the talent they need.

Because each of Canada’s provinces and territories have unique labour, skills, employment, and education priorities and ecosystems, building a culture of lifelong career development that serves all Canadians will require collaboration, responsiveness, and urgency. The career development sector already has the foundational tools to build upon and advance this important work.

We are no longer willing to remain hidden. We know today’s workforce challenges are complex, and we’re ready to serve Canadians of all generations today and in the future.

Signed,