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A Better Student Exchange: Why More Canadians Need to Study Abroad

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The vast majority of post-secondary students are entering the workforce without international experience, at a time when employers are placing greater importance on global awareness and intercultural competencies.

By some estimates, only 11% of Canadian undergraduates study aboard, compared to 33% in France, 29% in Germany and 16% in the U.S. For many, the cost of studying abroad and lack of credit transfers holds them back. But that may also shut them out of a fast-changing world.

“Given geopolitical and trade realities, Canada urgently needs to cultivate students with open minds and global competencies that can help to advance Canada’s diplomatic and trade relationships abroad,” said Larissa Bezo, president and CEO of the Canadian Bureau for International Education.

In less than two decades, the number of international students in Canada jumped 467%, to almost 600,000 across all levels of study. Nearly 70% of them study at post-secondary institutions, accounting for roughly 14% of all enrolment. Now, Canada wants to extend this momentum to outbound mobility, sending more Canadian students abroad.

Already, outbound student initiatives are gaining traction around the world. In the United Kingdom, the government plans to double the percentage of post-secondary students’ overseas experience. In the U.S., Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has hailed American students abroad as “citizen ambassadors,” adding that “international education should be part of every student’s academic career.” And in France, international student mobility is seen as a social justice issue.

Canadian academic leaders have called for the government to increase the percentage of Canadian students studying abroad to 25% in the next decade. Ottawa has begun to take notice.

In August, the federal government announced a $95 million, five-year pilot program under the International Education Strategy to encourage more Canadian students to gain overseas experience and build networks. The initiative will prioritize study programs in Asia and Latin America and is expected to benefit up to 11,000 Canadian post-secondary students. Half of the funds will be targeted at increasing participation of underrepresented groups, such as low-income and Indigenous students.

Canada needs more students like D’Arcy White, who interned last summer at a Chinese law firm in Shanghai. Before setting off, he was told a Chinese proverb — “It is better to travel 10,000 miles than to read 10,000 books.” He has taken it to heart. This semester, White, a law school student at the University of Toronto, will return to China to study at Tsinghua University in Beijing on a Canadian government scholarship. The opportunity to study in China, he says, comes with immerse challenges and opportunities that create both a sense of energy and intrigue.

“I think that stepping outside of one’s own environment ought to be a key part of a well-rounded education, especially for those in the social sciences and law,” he said. “Gaining a deeper understanding of China is becoming more important for tomorrow’s leaders.” While at Tsinghua, he will study language and Chinese law.

A large body of research shows that international exposure will prove beneficial to students. It increases students’ creativity, boosts their employability and helps cultivate empathy.

For many prominent public figures, overseas experiences have had an imprint on their careers. Before founding Apple, Steve Jobs took a months-long pilgrimage to India, a trip that gave him the spiritual fuel to later lead a legendary company. For Vera Wang, a celebrated American designer who once mulled a career in figure skating, studying in Paris during her junior year helped spark her love for fashion.

Despite the benefits, a number of factors have discouraged Canadian students from going abroad. Chief among them: cost. A 2016 survey from CBIE found that 85% of the respondents were interested in studying abroad, but 80% would require financial assistance to do so. Other major concerns cited included possible delayed graduation and course credit requirements.

In addition, the survey revealed that most Canadian students tended to choose countries that were culturally similar to Canada. France was the top destination, hosting 14% of Canadians studying abroad that year, followed by the United Kingdom (9%) and the U.S. (8%).

When Justin Raposo, a graduate student at the University of Toronto, debated where to go for an exchange abroad, he considered countries like Australia and New Zealand. But in the end, he settled on Japan instead because it would offer him a variety of different cultural experiences.

“Being able to engage with alternative perspectives, ideas and cultural backgrounds really does add something.” He noted that it’s important to “work through differences and understand you don’t know everything and your perception isn’t always the right one.” That understanding, he says, will eventually help him better navigate the complexity of the modern world.

For Canada to succeed in an increasingly globalized world, its workforce must be equipped with the cultural competencies that can help to diversify trade and deepen ties with emerging economies.

The CBIE’s Bezo says cultivating these opportunities is crucial to Canada’s future. “The next generation of private and public-sector Canadian leaders will require international experience, intercultural understanding and skills to excel in tomorrow’s inter-connected and interdependent world.”

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As Canadian farmers leave traditional tasks to smart machines, and focus on strategy and systems, they’ll be better positioned than ever to feed a fast-growing global population. But to do that, they’ll need a wide range of new skills, as well as enhanced old skills, that Canada isn’t developing anywhere near fast enough.

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According to Farmer 4.0, a new RBC report, the country could be short critical skills – data analysis, robotics and global sales, among them – that will be needed to transform the sector across a projected shortage of 123,000 agricultural workers by 2030. However, with the correct skills mix, agriculture could add another $11 billion to Canada’s GDP and make the sector more productive than auto manufacturing and aerospace combined.

Farmer 4.0 is the result of a four-month study by researchers and economists on the changing skills demands in agriculture, which combines data analysis with interviews with people on the front lines of the farming revolution.

The report found that Canadian farmers are at the intersection of a demographic and technological revolution. By 2025, one in four farmers will be 65 or older, with 110,000 expected to retire in the coming decade. Meanwhile, fewer young people than ever are entering agriculture.

Farmer 4.0 also analyzed the emergence of advanced technologies across a range of agricultural sub-sectors, and found they will not reduce employment in the near term but will change the skills needed over the decade by farms, aquaculture, vineyards and greenhouses.

The report found 14% of producers automated tasks last year, and the sector spent four times as much per worker on machinery as the overall economy did. But even though 95% of large producers reported using advanced technologies, Canada’s share of agtech investment was just 3.4% in 2018.

Using a model of skills clusters developed in Humans Wanted, a 2018 report from RBC, Farmer 4.0 presents five categories of agriculture workers that will be affected in very different ways by technology:

  • The most critical group, farm owners and operators that we’ve described as “deciders,” will need the digital expertise, leadership abilities and critical thinking skills to manage ever-larger and more complex operations.
  • A second group of skilled workers who service farm equipment will need to focus on increasingly smart machines, meaning they’ll have to develop the technological skills to tool robots and write code. The report estimates Canada will need another 25,000 such people, known as “enablers,” with software knowledge, business acumen and communications skills.
  • A third group known as “specialists,” with a particular knowledge of scientific fields such as genetics, blockchain and artificial intelligence, will create 18,000 more jobs.

One of the biggest challenges for policymakers will be among low-skilled labour roles, which are projected to account for 85,000 of the total shortages by 2030. The demand for such positions, which include fruit picking and planting, will become more acute in the short term – and more automatable in the long term. The transition will require a new approach to immigration and reskilling, among other policies.

Farmer 4.0 highlights innovations in countries such as the Netherlands, Australia and Israel, where agriculture education is at the cutting edge of those countries’ innovation agendas, and calls on Canada to adopt a new mix of farm skills that is more data-focused, innovation-minded and diverse. Among the recommendations in the report is a national skills strategy, including a push for more young people to enter the sector.

Agriculture will be central to Canada’s future health and prosperity. With the right mix of skills and technologies, Canadian farmers can help feed the world and grow Canada’s economy.

Listen to our two-part RBC Disruptors podcast on the coming agricultural skills revolution on Apple Podcasts, Google or Soundcloud.

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This summer, the company announced plans to boost the number of tradeswomen who will build the processing plant in Kitimat to 10%, double the provincial average.

This isn’t an act of goodwill – it’s a necessity. Canada is facing a critical shortage of skilled tradespeople. With demand rising and retirements accelerating, Build Force Canada estimates the construction industry will need to fill more than 300,000 vacancies over the next decade.

Women are an obvious way to deepen the talent pool: they make up about 48% of the Canadian labour force, yet hold less than 4% of jobs in the skilled trades.

“This lack of diversity is not a women’s issue, it is a workplace issue. We are missing out on a talented demographic,” said Andy Calitz, CEO of LNG Canada. “We want women to know there is a place for them on our project.”

Closing the gap will require the public and private sector actively recruiting, training and mentoring women in the trades, after decades of targeting men.

In Kitimat, LNG Canada has set up a four-week training program in partnership with Women Building Futures, an organization that supports women in the trades. It will be offered multiple times over the next 18 months, with the first training session starting in November. It doesn’t guarantee participants a job, but it puts them on the right track, and on LNG’s dime. The cost of airfare, accommodations, tuition and safety equipment is covered by the company.

It’s a robust response to the skills gap – and LNG is not alone. Across Canada, there is a concerted effort to change the old ways. And it’s starting to pay off. According to Statistics Canada’s most recent Labour Force Survey, the number of women in the trades is slowly ticking up, from 3.7% a decade ago to 3.9% now.

In last year’s federal budget, the government announced $20 million over five years for the Apprenticeship Incentive Grant for Women, which helps to cover the costs of training as an apprenticeship in a Red Seal Trade where women are underrepresented, like plumbing or welding. The government also announced $10 million over three years to support projects that have proven effective in attracting women to the trades, such as mentoring programs.

Even though it will continue to take time, bringing more women into the trades is part of an essential restructuring Canada needs to undertake as we enter the 2020s. We can rise to the skills challenge by empowering people with the right skills, regardless of old perceptions. The same is true in other places where we’re seeing a talent shortage, such as in STEM.

The next generation doesn’t feel bound by the same restrictive gender roles that previously kept women out of certain fields, and with the right opportunities, they’ll line up to participate.

In some cases, quite literally.

This past spring, Skills Ontario’s annual Young Women’s Conference was flooded with applicants from elementary schools. Some 1,300 girls tried to register for only 1,000 spots, according to CEO Ian Howcroft. They tried to accommodate the young girls the following day, during the high school program.

“We have had wait lists before, but this was a record for the elementary program,” Howcroft said.
 

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The world of work has rapidly evolved since then; but the very people preparing our students to join this new workforce haven’t experienced exactly what it’s like firsthand.

This is one of the challenges raised in a new RBC report, Bridging the Gap: What Canadians Told us about the Skills Revolution. The report is the result of a year spent travelling across the country, following up on our landmark research into the future of work, Humans Wanted.

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What if co-ops weren’t just for students, but for teachers? Sarah Reid, a young professional working as a cheese maker in Blyth, Ontario, thought this might better connect the education sector and the world of work.

“Teachers would know what students are going to see and experience, what they’ll be expected to do. That kind of integration would be amazing,” Reid said. Right now, only about 1 in 6 high school students realize their career plan through to age 25; much of this is due to poor awareness of their post-secondary options and potential jobs.

Jesse Rodgers, the CEO of the Volta innovation hub in Halifax, saw a lot of value in the idea. If teachers spent time at Volta, they could learn about new ideas and careers being created there through the use of new technology. They would then have more information to share with students as they begin to make their own career choices.

In addition to career counselling, teacher co-ops would instill a deeper understanding of how the world has fundamentally altered, sharpening teaching skills no matter the subject.

It’s an idea that’s already gaining traction in the United States.

Last year in Pennsylvania, 1200 educators took part in the state’s Teacher in the Workplace program. Teachers, counselors, and administrators from K-12 are matched with industry and business leaders to learn about industry trends, needs, and opportunities. With this firsthand experience, teachers can enhance instruction, student learning, and career readiness.

This spring, the state’s governor expanded the program under its new Workforce Command Center, announcing a 30% funding boost to commit US $2.6 million to the project.

“Teachers bring that experience to their classrooms to develop lessons that teach students the skills they will need for those good jobs,” Governor Tom Wolf said at the announcement. “Teachers can also tell students and parents about the new and growing careers available in their community.”

Pursuing a similar idea in Canada is intriguing – but there are still questions to be answered.

Former high school teacher Kari Marken, who now works as an educational designer at UBC’s Centre for Student Involvement & Careers, suggested bringing people from the workforce into schools for classroom talks is a better way to give students insights, without creating more work for teachers.

Marken also noted that many teachers have professional experiences beyond school that they can draw on to inform their conversations with students.

While the average tenure of a teacher in Canada is 16 years, younger teachers still have one foot in the workforce. In Ontario, 62% of first year teachers must take non-teaching jobs due to lack of permanent positions. More than half of them take jobs as tutors, child care, or adult education, while the rest work in hospitality, retail, administration, and many balance more than one alternative work arrangement.

“As the workforce undergoes rapid changes, I’m not sure that anyone is equipped to offer career advice,” Marken said. “However, I think we all have a role to play in posing really good questions that challenge and support students in their navigation of so much change.”

Testing this idea on a small scale could net results on the local level, as the Chamber of Commerce in Minnesota has found. It has funded two pilot projects to strengthen the links between teachers and local businesses. In the northern town of Hibbing, high school teachers visit businesses for an in-service day to learn about future jobs that will be available to students.

Further south in Winona, middle school and high school teachers have the chance to complete a one-week paid summer immersion program in the local manufacturing sector. There’s an added bonus with this program: the businesses also gain valuable feedback from having experienced teachers joining them on the job for a week, providing meaningful contributions to the workplace.

Every fall, Take Your Kid to Work Day gives grade nine students the chance to explore the workplace. It’s time for a serious discussion about whether there’s value in earmarking another date on the calendar: Take Your Teacher to Work Day.

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That’s a 10% survival rate. Even sectors previously thought to be safe – mattresses, oil and gas, health care – are now grappling with power players from unexpected places. In the age of mass disruption, every company needs to be ready for the day they wake up to the news that Amazon is moving onto their turf. Just yesterday, Amazon unveiled a new credit card that’s aimed at those with bad credit, something no retailer has done before. At the recent ICD Conference in Toronto, I had the opportunity to ask a panel of veteran board members how to get ready for your Amazon moment. Here are 6 takeaways from my discussion with John Cassaday, who chairs the board of Manulife Financial, and is director of Irving Oil, Sysco and Sleep Country Canada; Kathleen O’Neill, who sits on the boards of Finning International, ARC Resources, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan; and Michael Wilson, who chairs the board of Suncor and sits on the boards of Air Canada and Celestica.

1. Set a Bold Agenda

“Too often we just accept the agenda,” Cassaday said of board meetings. Try sending out the agenda a month in advance instead – that gives the board the opportunity to review and add new items, while allowing management time to prepare

2. Create the Right Culture

The tone is set from the top – so boards need to support innovation and disruptive thinking with candid, open, transparent discussions. “If the board sets the right tone, it permeates management,” O’Neill said. “Boards need to spend time looking at themselves, creating the right culture.”

3. Bring on the Experts

Boards used to hire generalists, but now subject matter experts have arrived on the scene – and they’re invaluable. John says he encourages people to go full steam ahead with questions and insights when their area of expertise comes up. “When it’s your turn, be great. Don’t worry about taking up ice time.” O’Neill raised the idea of rotating 10-year memberships, because the skills you require on your board are always changing.

4. Disrupt the Board Itself

Having a diversity of views on the board is important, and productive. “I encourage someone who is prepared to throw a contrarian view out there, aggressively,” Wilson said. But within reason – you don’t want to create an adversarial environment, or you won’t get transparency. “There’s a line between disruptive and disrespectful,” he added.

5. Never Stop Learning

“Directors shouldn’t think about the job as just meetings, but an ongoing commitment to stay up to speed,” Cassaday said. Board-wide education should be an integral part of the calendar, with site visits and input from external experts. Wilson added that he always insists on reading all the analyst reports – not just the ones highlighted by management, but the “sell” reports too. What are the dissenting views? What can you learn from them?

6. Look Back, Not Just Ahead

Cassaday ran Corus for 15 years, during which time mass disruption hit the media landscape. He says he regrets spending “virtually no time” reflecting as the company sought a way forward, notably through acquisitions. “We were always looking ahead to the next deal instead of thinking about the deal from three years ago.” Even when change is coming at a rapid past, you need to be learning from the past.

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But if we want to maintain this momentum, we have to pay careful attention to some clouds on the horizon: the countries that supply most of Canada’s international students are getting a lot better at postsecondary education.

In the QS World University Rankings 2019, no Canadian schools made it into the top 25 in the world, and only 3 were within the top 100: the University of Toronto (at 28), McGill University (at 33) and the University of British Columbia (at 47). Just missing the cut: the University of Alberta was ranked 109th, after falling 19 spots from 2018.

Meanwhile, Chinese universities are ascending. Over the last year, 8 of the top 10 Chinese schools rose in the rankings, while 8 of the top 10 Canadians schools fell. There are now twice as many Chinese schools as Canadian in the top 100 — six vs. three. China’s top performer was Tsinghua University in Beijing, which jumped eight spots from the year before. Other universities jumped by as many as 25 spots (Wuhan University and Tongji University) or even by 40 spots (Harbin Institute of Technology).

This rise reflects the payoff from China’s huge national investment in education, and an emphasis on improving standards at the top universities, all with the goal of becoming a global higher education centre.

Canada’s appeal in the current political climate goes beyond our academic reputation. The United States and the United Kingdom dominate the top 10 spots in the rankings, but political changes in both countries make them less appealing for young people from abroad.

There’s an opportunity here to solidify Canada’s place on the international stage, but we need to recognize that global rankings inform international student mobility, and perform at a higher level.

When evaluating the universities, QS looks at four major indicators: academic reputation, reputation among employers, faculty to student ratio, and research citations per faculty member. China outperformed Canada in each category.

Even our top universities are faltering in two of the key areas: faculty to student ratio, and research citations per faculty member. Taking a closer look at McGill, which ranks 33rd overall, it’s clear how much these areas are dragging down the university’s otherwise impressive showing: it ranks 183rd in faculty to student ratio, and 175th in citations per faculty.

Looking at specific subject areas, China and Canada are split on performance: Canada comes out ahead in Arts & Humanities and Life Sciences; but China scores higher in Engineering & Technology, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences & Management.

It’s critical that we capitalize on our existing strengths, and at the same time secure more resources for the areas where we’re falling behind. If we can top these world rankings, we’ll attract the world’s top talent.

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Until now. The lower mainland is catching up with Montreal, Toronto and Edmonton as its universities and entrepreneurs bring some west coast savvy to the artificial intelligence race. And in British Columbia, that means computer vision, Cascadia and the confidence of Hollywood North. Vancouver is home to 130 AI startups, as well as four major investor groups, four incubators and four public research labs focused on AI. The hometown companies include Vision Critical, an OMERS-funded venture focused on consumer patterns; Finn.ai, which is applying AI to day-to-day banking; and Generation R Consulting, which is based at the University of British Columbia and pioneered an AI ethics assessment tool for Technical Safety BC, an organization that oversees the safe installation of technical systems and equipment across the province. The word is out, and investors are in. In 2017, Vancouver’s own Kindred closed a $35.4 million Series B funding round led by Chinese investor Tencent. In the past month alone, Mitsubishi invested $5.8m in Spare, an AI-enabled platform for on-demand mobility and smart transportation networks and Fujitsu opened its global AI headquarters, Fujitsu Intelligence Technology, in Vancouver. RBC added to the ecosystem this week with the official opening of a Borealis AI lab where 20 researchers are hard at work. It’s run by Greg Mori, a computer vision specialist and former head of computing science at Simon Fraser University. Mori said the research at such universities on ethical issues like AI bias and “explainability” is working its way into the commercial development of AI in Canada. Borealis is thought to be the largest AI initiative by a Canadian company, with other labs in Montreal, Toronto, Waterloo and Edmonton. Mori noted that Vancouver is rare among cities to have two world-class computing science schools, at SFU and UBC. Moreover, “there’s an interplay here between universities and industries that’s really important,” he said at the opening of the Borealis lab in Yaletown. With more than 300 graduate and 2,000 undergraduate students, SFU is ranked among the world’s top 50 computing science schools, and among Canada’s top 5 based on citations per faculty member. UBC’s main AI research organization, Centre for AI Decision-making and Action, involves more than 50 researchers across five faculties. Its Computer Vision and Robotics research group created Scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT), a widely-used feature detection algorithm in computer vision. There’s even a new player in town: Northeastern University is adding a Vancouver location to its expanding global campus network, planning graduate programs and work integrated learning opportunities that support B.C.’s rapidly growing expertise in AI and data visualization. Mori has been developing the Vancouver lab since last September, with a particular focus on computer vision, his academic specialty. It’s a subfield of machine learning that trains computers to see, process, and understand images such as videos and photographs, to identify and distinguish objects – a cat versus a dog, for instance – and even track motion to predict outcomes, such as the likelihood of a player taking a shot in basketball. The computer vision movement is building on Vancouver’s natural ties with the Seattle area – Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing – and the larger Cascadia region that reaches down to Silicon Valley. It’s also deeply rooted in the lower mainland’s history in video games, moviemaking and post-production, which earned it the nickname of “Hollywood North.” Vancouver is the world’s largest economic cluster for visual effects and animation, with more than 60 studios, including Sony Picture Imageworks, Industry Light & Magic (ILM), DHX Media and Image Engine, which was behind Drogon’s iconic attack on the loot train in season seven of Game of Thrones. The city is also thriving with video game clusters built around Electronic Arts, Microsoft and Nintendo Education. As visual media transitions to virtual and augmented realities – and brings with it new orders of data that can feed AI applications – the digital power to transform entire industries may be profound. It’s part of the logic of the federal government’s $153-million commitment to a Digital Technology Supercluster that is projected to generate more than $5 billion in economic output and 13,500 new jobs over the next decade. Canada could use that kind of integration between academic research and commercial application in AI:
  • While Canada was third in the world (after the US and China) for AI scholars with academic publications, we were ninth for patents filed
  • We ranked last out of 10 countries for AI deployment, with just 31% of adopters claiming success compared to 51% globally
  • Only 17% of Canadian businesses reported using AI technologies over the last year – a number that has barely changed since 2014, when it was 16%, according to the 2018 Deloitte survey of 1,000 Canadian citizens and 2,500 businesses found
  • 67% of those firms spent less than $5 million on AI in the 2017-2018 fiscal year
  • Only 8% of companies planned to increase AI spending by more than 20% in upcoming year

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A year ago, RBC released Humans Wanted: How Canadian youth can thrive in the age of disruption, a ground-breaking study on how Canada is shifting from a jobs economy to a skills economy and what we’re doing to prepare for this transformation.

Then we hit the road. We travelled from Halifax to Victoria, bringing together 5,000 Canadians to share our findings, and to discuss how the skills gap is changing the way we study, educate and run our businesses.

The result is our new report, Bridging the Gap: What Canadians told us about the skills revolution, which brings together the perspectives of educators, employers and youth on the skills revolution. What emerged was less about technology, and more about people. We heard some compelling ideas –big and small – from Canadians about how we can prepare for the future.

Among the messages we heard, Canadians feel the country needs more:

  • arts and sciences in our schools
  • management skills in the digital economy
  • digital skills in traditional industries
  • skills training for Indigenous youth
  • help for small businesses to hire students

Prosperity for all Canadians is directly linked to our ability to prepare young people to succeed in a fast-changing global economy. The themes and ideas that emerged from our cross-country journey offer a promising way forward for Canada as we enter the 2020s.

The future of work may be changing, but Canada’s youth have the potential, the ambition and power to impact the world around them.

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“I told them straight up, I’m not technically gifted,” Adatia said. “I bring something different.”

In the end, he landed the job. In the age of disruption, different can be good.

In a new RBC report, Bridging the Gap: What Canadians Told us about the Skills Revolution, we followed up on our landmark research into the future of work, Humans Wanted, by spending a year travelling across the country, engaging with students, educators, business owners and policymakers.

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Over the course of those discussions, a number of insights emerged into how the skills revolution is playing out across our country — and the challenges we need to confront.

One of those challenges is that Liberal Arts programs are in decline — even though demand for their skills is up. We heard from employers that they are increasingly looking for candidates with the soft skills cultivated in the arts and sciences, such as critical thinking and communication — but post-secondary leaders told us enrollment in the Liberal Arts is down by double-digits.

In our tech-obsessed society, public discourse is so hostile to the humanities that young people are turning away from them, according to Patrick Deane, the president at McMaster University.

“Parents, governments and society at large underestimate the critical skills fostered in the humanities – this is a long-term systemic and cultural problem,” Deane said.

Between 2011 and 2017, enrollment in the humanities fell by 17.5%. Over the same period, enrollment increased by 45% in mathematics, computer and information sciences. These areas of study are seen as a more direct path to a steady job after graduation, the holy grail for young people who grew up in the shadow of the Great Recession.

Students studying arts and sciences find themselves worrying about where they fit into the future of work.

“Everyone’s scared of not getting a job,” Adatia said. “You can have a passion but you can’t have a job, that’s the perception.”

But it’s not the reality. While students are increasingly choosing specialized training, employers are looking for well-rounded graduates. According to LinkedIn, the top soft skills employers are having trouble hiring for are creativity, persuasion and collaboration.

“Soft skills are every bit as important as numeracy,” said Steven Murphy, Ontario Tech’s president and vice chancellor.

Adatia, whose philosophy major is complimented by a minor in commerce, found his future employer was willing to help get him up to speed on the technical aspects of the job. The team was excited by the skills he already brought to the table, like the ability to think critically, argue and reason.

Today’s demand for a Liberal Arts skillset isn’t happening despite automation. It’s happening because of it. As more tasks become automated in the workplace, there is a growing demand for people with the skills to both complement and collaborate with technology.

Employers are looking for technical capacity as a baseline. Those who get hired, like Adatia, are the ones that can demonstrate communication and complex problem solving skills.

Heading into the 2020s, we need more curiosity and creativity from all new grads in Canada. This is behind a growing push for interdisciplinary learning. While STEM grads need soft skills, humanities programs need to focus on providing digital fluency to their students. Gone are the days when students can be a ‘master of one’.

The future of work may be changing, but Canada’s youth have the potential, the ambition and power to impact the world around them.

Getting the word out to young graduates about the opportunities that await them is a communications challenge for employers and career counsellors.

Our Bridging the Gap research shows arts students exactly what to do with their B.A. after graduation: put it on their CV.

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With RBC marking its 150th anniversary at this week’s AGM in Halifax, here are 8 impressive innovations to come out of Nova Scotia.

1. Newsprint

Growing up near Sackville, Nova Scotia, Charles Fenerty worked in the family lumber mill— but his real passion was writing. Fenerty became interested in the process of making paper, which at the time was made from rags. He noticed operational similarities between paper and lumber mills, and developed a new form of parchment made from leftover wood pulp — much easier to come by than old rags. By 1844, local newspapers weren’t just writing about Fenerty’s invention — they were printing on it.

2. Kerosene Oil

After a failed career at sea that included two shipwrecks, Abraham Pineo Gesner opted for a more stable career as a doctor in Parrsboro, Nova Scotia. But he also pursued his love of earth sciences, conducting in-depth research about mineral deposits in Nova Scotia. Blending coal, bitumen and oil shale he created a new liquid fuel — kerosene. It burned more cleanly than other products available at the time, and at a lower cost. In 1853, Gesner moved to New York City and built the first large scale refinery in North America, distributing kerosene across the continent.

3. The Wheelchair Accessible Bus

After the Second World War, Walter Harris Callow had an idea to help injured veterans integrate back into everyday life — a wheelchair accessible bus. Callow understood the need firsthand; he had been serious injured during his pilot training in the First World War. Callow designed the Walter Callow Wheelchair Bus, enlisting the support of major automobile manufacturers. The first coach hit the road in 1947, and it was a hit — taking local veterans who had been confined to their homes out to sporting events, on picnics, and to art classes.

4. The Propeller

It will come as no surprise that the propeller was invented by a sea captain. John Patch lived in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, where he created an early version of the screw propeller. Inspired by the efficiency of single oar sculling, he began to experiment with a propeller based on those same motions. In 1833, Patch demonstrated his propeller to crowds gathered at the Yarmouth Harbour — it was a marvel at the time, powering the small boat across the water. His invention earned praise in an 1848 article in Scientific American magazine, headlined “Patch’s Propeller”.

5. The Odometer

Travelling in a horse-drawn carriage in the 1850s, Samuel McKeen of Mabou, Nova Scotia, invented the modern odometer. He did this by attaching gear plates to the frame of a carriage and connecting them to a pinion on the carriage’s wheel. As the wheels turned, the invention measured the miles he travelled.

6. The HIV Rapid-Testing Kit

Dr. Abdullah Kirumira has been described as the pioneer of Nova Scotia’s biotechnology sector. Originally from Uganda, he moved to Nova Scotia in the 1990s to become a biochemistry professor at Acadia University. Dr. Kirumira led a small team that developed the world’s first rapid-acting HIV screening test, which takes just three minutes to diagnose HIV — a groundbreaking development for clinics unable to afford traditional diagnostic labs.

7. The Donair

No list of Nova Scotian inventions would be complete without a salute to Halifax’s spin on Greek-style gyros. In the 1970s, Peter Gamoulakos, who immigrated to Nova Scotia from Greece, began experimenting with gyros at his restaurant off the Bedford Highway in the 1970s, swapping out lamb for beef to be more appealing to the local pallet. The secret, of course, is the sauce: condensed milk, sugar, garlic and vinegar. The creation has earned the praise of celebrity chefs including Anthony Bourdain.

8. Study and Stay

In the years to come, how can Nova Scotia attract and retain talent to spur more innovations? The answer just might be its Study and Stay pilot program. Launched in 2016, Study and Stay supports international students while they study, and provides a range of employment and mentoring services to help them transition into working in their professions in the province. The latest numbers show Nova Scotia is now retaining 9.4% of international students — a historic high. Other provinces are starting to follow the province’s lead.