Collège La Cité, the largest French-language college in Ontario, is using the Francophone Immigration Skill Passport platform called RADAR to assist French-speaking newcomers to Canada so they can match their skills to job opportunities across the country and access training to address their skills gaps.
This is all part of a two-year pilot project to
- Have 600 newcomers use SkyHive to build their Skill Passport (more on that below)
- Optimize efforts using skills intelligence to ensure a match between the skills sought by employers and the skills of the job seekers (jobseekers see the percentage that they match to a variety of jobs)
- Help at least 150 develop the missing skills for the jobs they seek
In Eastern Ontario, Collège La Cité has “Employment Prospectors” trained in using the SkyHive Skills platform. They help employers clearly define and validate the competencies employers might need by comparing their needs to competencies being sought by those of the sector they compete in. Meanwhile, other La Cité counsellors can help identify candidates with transferable skills as well as the training they might require to more quickly integrate into the workplace. La Cité might even be able to help find financing for training initiatives that help new staff integrate to the workplace and deliver those missing training elements.
Consistency and Context
Paul Toupin is the Director of La Cité des affaires at Collège La Cité. He says that he's "noticed since using the tool that you could take an individual who could walk into one employment center in one office and be directed in a certain job skilling pathway, and come into another employment center and meet another employment counselor and be directed in a completely different pathway. This eliminates that.”
Toupin says that the consistency provided by the Skill Passport is a “really, really true testimony to the tool.”
SkyHive CEO Sean Hinton says that legacy job boards wouldn’t provide La Cité the kind of employer-job seeker matches that this advanced technology does. Those job boards mainly focus on job titles, not skills. Job titles like “product manager,” “project manager,” “customer service representative” and so on tell very little about a given job.
In contrast, SkyHive’s skills intelligence sees the context of a job; it can inform La Cité what skills were likely used by a project manager in a certain organization at a certain time.
Toupin says that he has tried a variety of legacy job boards as well. “They’re pretty much all focused on job titles and not competencies and skills, and I can search them for a long time and not get the results I get with cutting-edge technology,” he says.
Toupin adds that Collège La Cité first used SkyHive’s Quantum Labor Analysis to examine the impact of the pandemic on the Ontario manufacturing sector’s labor capacity following the U.S. trade tariffs on steel and aluminum. More recently, it used SkyHive to complete a labor market analysis of the francophone employment landscape outside of Québec.
Toupin is continually monitoring the skills most in demand by employers and seeing who can be reskilled with those high-value skills. “We’re really thrilled about this collaboration between the college and SkyHive and the kind of data now at our disposal,” he says. “We’re getting very precise information.”
La Cité has also tested out the skills intelligence for its own hiring. It has been able to surface both internal candidates as well as external candidates who would have been ignored. The competency-based analysis makes it easier to identify candidates who align with the skills sought for the position. The ability for this AI technology to match skills to current jobs saves time.
Passport to Opportunities
What La Cite is doing is one use of the SkyHive Skill Passport (you may have read about its use in Ghana, New York, or in the European fishing and aquaculture industries). The SkyHive Skill Passport connects people with jobs and training opportunities at rapid speed. In about six minutes, individuals can build a Skill Passport to identify their skills. From there, they can access job and training opportunities based on the gaps between their skills and their career goals.
For governments in multiple countries, the Skill Passports help their constituents understand the skills they have, the skills they’ll need, and the optimal pathway to remain relevant and competitive—regardless of their previous job title. It helps governments attract businesses to their areas by showcasing the supply of talent. And it reduces unemployment, transfer payments, and other societal costs of people being out of work.
More information on what La Cite is doing is here for both employers looking to hire from the program as well as for job seekers.
