Good morning Erin Duff, and thank you for your note regarding your concerns for the Province’s Blueprint for Jobs. My sense is that you are reacting somewhat in the extreme to this change in policy, at least I hope so. Certainly the government has positioned LNG as the core of our economic future and thus has identified the need for more vocationally trained youth from our education system to meet the needs of this venture. The reality is the government has only converted $270 Million of its annual $7.5 Billion budget to align training in our post-secondary institutions to high demand jobs in our economy, and not until about 2017. Certainly we need to better guide those learning institutions to be more responsive to our economic opportunities and not allow continued spending in areas of low requirements or demand. As an example, each year in BC we graduate over 3000 teachers from those institutions, and historically only employ about 700 of them, thus we have many of our well educated youth, presumably with some form of student debt finding themselves unemployable in this province. At the same time, many of those same institutions put significant caps on enrollment in professional schools and vocational schools due to self-inflicted funding restrictions, and the need for more nurses, trades people and professionals of all kinds goes wanting. The need to re-engineer our funding in this area is acute. As far as the K-12 system is concerned, again I hope you are incorrect in your assumption that children’s education choices will be limited. There will certainly be bumped up initiatives in the system designed to bring more attention to the trades option, and children will become more aware through various means of their options in the world of work. I don’t think this is bad if its not mandated. But certainly, once a child makes a choice in Grade 10 to opt for the Trades pathway, (in the ACE IT program for example) that is their choice. I do appreciate your views on this matter and will bear those in mind when the chamber engages Education officials on these issues in the future. Your concerns are likely shared by others, and they should be acknowledged. Our interests as employers is to attract and retain well educated BC youth into our economy to enable them to grow and prosper. Regards, John R. Winter President & CEO 604.638.8110 | bcchamber.org BC Chamber of Commerce | The Voice of Business in BC
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 19:59:58 +0000
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