We are investing billions in the skilled-trades pipeline. But where does the pipeline begin?
We urgently needs more skilled tradespeople. Governments know it. Employers know it. Colleges and unions know it. And the country is responding, with major investments in apprenticeships, training, paid work placements and incentives designed to bring more young people into the skilled trades.
But important new Canadian research suggests that simply creating more training opportunities at the far end of the pipeline isn't enough. A recent report prepared for the Residential Construction Council of Ontario (RESCON), Are We Ready to Build Canada? A Behavioural Analysis of Canada’s Construction Talent Pipeline and Skills Training Policy, examines why well-funded training opportunities are still not producing enough skilled workers.
Among the barriers it identifies are knowledge gaps when people are young, lingering social stigma surrounding the trades, unclear pathways, and obstacles that cause people to abandon training. One of its recommendations is particularly striking: learning about the skilled trades should begin in primary school.
That raises a question I have been asking for years: What if we need to look much further upstream? A young person doesn't suddenly become interested in becoming an electrician, carpenter, welder, machinist, HVAC technician or construction manager at 18.
Career aspirations begin forming years earlier. They are shaped by what young people see, who they meet, what their parents and teachers know, what experiences schools make possible, and by the occupations they never encounter at all. Young people cannot aspire to opportunities they don't know exist.
Imagine if every Canadian student, beginning in elementary school, had repeated opportunities to:
• meet people doing work they had never heard of;
• visit workplaces and experience work firsthand;
• understand how what they learn in school connects with real work;
• discover apprenticeships, college, university and other pathways without one being treated as inherently more successful than another; and
• gradually build the confidence, connections and career agency to navigate their own future.
Then our skilled-trades investments would have a much larger and more diverse pool of young Canadians ready to take advantage of them. We don't only have a skilled-trades shortage. We have an exposure shortage.
The skilled-trades pipeline shouldn't begin with an apprenticeship application. It should begin with curiosity. That's part of the missing bridge between education and meaningful work. And building that bridge is nation building.
Research: Nathaniel Barr, Michael J. McNamara & James K. Stewart, Are We Ready to Build Canada? A Behavioural Analysis of Canada’s Construction Talent Pipeline and Skills Training Policy, prepared for RESCON (2026).
AI Acknowledgement: I conceived and wrote this post, with creative and editorial assistance from my partner, ChatGPT.
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