At St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, healthcare professionals will soon use AI-powered tools to identify patients at the highest risk of being admitted to the ICU.
In radiation oncology, researchers are leveraging AI to accelerate treatment planning, promising faster, more precise care.
“The only way we will achieve scale is by training more trainers.”
You might think that training artificial intelligence models to solve major medical challenges would be the hardest element of these workplace initiatives.
But it turns out programming humans is even harder.
“The real challenge lies in equipping Canadians with the skills needed to thrive in this new AI-driven landscape,” says Noel Baldwin, Executive Director at the Future Skills Centre. “With unrealized skills vacancies costing us about $25 billion annually—more than 1% of our GDP—there’s a critical need to focus on essential skills and training. To achieve our transition and productivity goals, we must incentivize employers to invest in comprehensive AI training and support the development of relevant programs.”
By now, most individuals and industries have heard about the potential of AI to revolutionize industries and transform lives.
But what’s not clear is whether the Canadian workforce is ready to adopt and effectively apply this technology.
To address this gap, the Future Skills Centre (FSC) was created in 2019 to foster a more responsive skills development ecosystem in Canada, making sure that workers and employers across fields and geographies are able to adapt to the times and embrace emerging opportunities.
Funded by the Government of Canada, FSC has invested more than $200 million in research and innovation initiatives to strengthen Canada’s skills ecosystem.
“We recognize that Canada’s economy is evolving rapidly as a result of technological, demographic, environmental and geopolitical change,” said Baldwin. “That change inevitably alters the nature of work and it’s our role to understand the gaps that need to be addressed.”
One of the gaps FSC is actively addressing is the ability of Canadian workers to embrace new tools.
As part of this work, FSC partnered with the Michener Institute to specifically address AI skills gaps in healthcare. The project found that healthcare professionals needed foundational education on AI, helping them understand and embrace the possibilities of the technology.
David Wiljer, Executive Director of Digital Education at the Michener Institute of Education, said the project helped clinicians “identify problems that are emerging in their practice, in the work that they do, that might have solutions in AI.”
Wiljer noted three steps in helping front-line clinicians and leaders feel comfortable using new AI tools: mindset, skillset and toolset.
“We really needed to think about what was the mindset of clinicians and leaders toward AI and how might we influence that and help them to understand what the power of AI might be,” he said. “We needed to increase the skills around decision-making. And on the toolset side, we wanted to create a collaborative innovation hub that would allow people to practice with their new knowledge.”
Of course, healthcare isn’t the only sector that requires Canadians to rapidly scale up their understanding of new technology.
A recent study performed by The Dais, a public policy and leadership think tank at Toronto Metropolitan University, analyzed data from nine million jobs posted across Canada between January 2020 and June 2023, to examine how the demand for skills has evolved.
The report found a significant rise in job postings requiring digital skills, especially around software/product development and data skills, cybersecurity and system infrastructure skills, industrial modelling and geospatial software skills, design and marketing skills, and workforce digital skills.
To address these skills gaps, Vivian Li, Senior Economist at The Dias, said Canada is going to need more targeted skills development programs, and quickly.
“A big piece of that is funding from the government for some of these skills development programs,” Li said. “Whether it’s delivered through employers or through municipalities. I think that would be really essential.”
Wiljer agrees that additional funding could go to good use to support free training programs, sector-specific research, and leadership development, which he believes are essential to the successful adoption of AI in Canada.
“If we can get leaders on side understanding the value, giving them some basic AI literacy, and having them understand some of the choices that they need to make, then people who have the innovations, have the ideas, can actually plug in and make things happen,” he said.
In Québec, FSC is also funding work that will help Canadians recognize when they need to upskill.
IVADO, a research, training, and knowledge mobilization association dedicated to advancing and promoting responsible AI, recently partnered with FSC to develop a self-diagnosis tool that allows professionals to evaluate their AI skills and identify areas for improvement.
The 20-question self-diagnosis tool is free to the public but primarily targets industry professionals with a basic understanding of AI. It’s currently available in French but an English version is in development.
Réjean Roy, Director of Training and Knowledge Mobilization at IVADO noted that while managers of technical teams generally have a sense of their team’s AI skills, they often lack the detailed knowledge needed to provide effective training.
“One of the things they could do with this tool is determine with more precision that person A is very strong in this particular area whereas person B is weak overall,” he said. “And then given the results obtained with the tool we could direct people to training so they can improve their skills.”
So far, IVADO has deployed FSC funding to develop nine courses on six different themes and trained more than 3,000 people. They hope to train and certify 2,000 professionals annually.
Roy believes that advancing AI depends on training industry leaders who can, in turn, educate their peers and employees.
There is already a shortage of AI specialists, he noted, and even fewer are well-versed in the technology’s sector-specific applications. Roy refers to those who combine expertise in AI with sector-specific knowledge as “translators.”
“Let’s say you have one or two translators. These people are going to give courses to 20 people, who will then in turn reach 200, 2,000 people,” Roy said. “This is what we have to do sector by sector, region by region, and the only way we will achieve scale is by training more trainers.”
PRESENTED BY
Unlock the Future of Work: Dive Into the State of Skills in AI Report Today!
Discover the essential skills shaping tomorrow’s workforce. Access the report here and stay ahead in the AI-driven job market.
All images provided by Future Skills Canada.