If the provincial government thinks that making it faster to obtain degrees and diplomas using for-profit career colleges is a good way to help increase the province's depleted workforce, their decision-makers need to get better schooling themselves.
In her most recent 'mandate letter' issued to Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith wants to continue exploring ways to have private, for-profit learning centres issue diplomas and degrees to bolster the province's work force and professional brain-drain.
The province needs more doctors, nurses too — and more teachers would be a good thing, plus a bunch more transport truck drivers, shippers and receivers, restaurant or retail mangers ... the list goes on. With more and more Albertans finding themselves without a family doctor, to more and more Albertans finding store shelves empty of needed products, to customer service lacking in retail establishments, the effects of the labouring labour market is apparent in all corners of our communities.
Finding and hiring a trained workforce is essential to fix the growing issue.
But fixing it with faster turnstiles to churn out workers seems to be a poor work-around. Simply unleashing people into the market with expedited credentials won't make things better. It will instead provide valid foot-holds for public discourse when things inevitably go wrong. The government will say they did their job of getting trained people into the flagging workforce, they did their job to get the numbers up.
But at what cost? Quantity rarely surpasses quality when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Properly trained professionals — whether they are surgeons, pilots, grocery store supervisors, golf course groundskeepers or soldiers — need, you guessed it, proper training. Speeding up certifications, pushing more people through for-profit institutions with the sole goal of bumping up workforce numbers is not the answer.
Yes, Albertans want their doctors back, and of course consumers hate to see the effects of supply-chain issues on their grocery bills, but this mandate to boost the economy will likely only boost the bottom line of what will undoubtedly become Alberta's newest source of government-assisted wealth — the folks who own private, for-profit training schools.