Five Takeaways from CPECN’s Skilled Workforce Summit
September 15, 2026
By Kirstyn Brown
The webinar, "Skilled Workforce Summit: Solving Canada's Labor Gap," brought together a workforce development strategist and a manufacturing HR leader to talk about how organizations can build, mentor and retain the talent they need.
[Credit: Tanin via Adobe Stock] Talking Points
Speakers at the Skilled Workforce Summit emphasized that Canada's industrial sector faces a deepening skills gap, requiring a shift in approach to workforce development. Andrew Bieler from the Business and Higher Education Roundtable and Sarah Duguay from Endress+Hauser Canada discussed the importance of mentorship and holistic talent development strategies.
- Bieler highlighted that effective work-integrated learning (WIL) models depend on an employer's goals and capacity.
- Duguay reframed the labour gap as a structural issue, advocating for internal talent development rather than solely focusing on recruitment.
- Both speakers stressed the need for early engagement with youth to reshape perceptions of manufacturing careers.
This discussion is crucial as it addresses long-term solutions to Canada's labour shortages, impacting economic growth and industry sustainability.
Canada’s industrial sector has been talking about the skills gap for years, but have yet to find a solution. To address this ongoing problem, speakers at CPECN’s recent Skilled Workforce Summit: Solving Canada’s Labour Gap presented ways employers can look beyond recruiting and build long-term talent resilience through workforce development, mentorship, knowledge transfer and industry-education partnerships.
The session paired Andrew Bieler, director of partnerships and experiential learning at the Business and Higher Education Roundtable (BHER), with Sarah Duguay, human resources manager at Endress+Hauser Canada, for a mix of presentations and a fireside Q&A. Bieler spoke from a national, research-backed vantage point on work-integrated learning (WIL). Duguay drew on a decade of first-hand lessons building talent pipelines inside a 170-person Canadian manufacturing operation.
Here’s what the audience took away from the session.
There’s no single “right” model for work-integrated learning
Bieler’s core message was that there’s no single right WIL program. The right model depends on an employer’s capacity and goals. For example, for trades, he pointed to shared or group apprenticeship models, where a third-party intermediary handles recruiting, screening and admin, reducing the barrier for small and mid-sized employers who can’t sponsor apprentices directly. For tech talent, he highlighted sponsored degree programs such as York University’s Bachelor of Science in Digital Technologies and Shopify’s Dev Degree, where roughly 80 per cent of the program is paid, applied work. For employers with less capacity, lighter-touch options like industry projects — where student teams tackle a real business challenge over a single course — can still expand an organization’s reach.
“The benefits you experience depend on aligning the WIL model with your organization’s capacity,” Bieler said, adding that longer-duration placements consistently produce stronger returns because supervision costs are front-loaded while a learner’s productive contribution rises the longer they stay.
Mentorship makes or breaks the model
Whichever WIL model an employer chooses, Bieler argued, its success hinges on mentorship.
“[Mentorship] can’t just depend on goodwill,” he said. “It’s a key component in continually developing and retaining your talent.”
Learners become productive, he explained, when expectations are clear, feedback is timely and someone protects the space to practice.
That mentorship challenge is compounding as workplaces become more intergenerational and more digitized at the same time. Bieler noted that older journeypersons may be more comfortable with traditional methods while younger apprentices may only know newer tools — meaning a knowledge transfer strategy now has to address cross-generational and cross-cultural communication, not just technical skill.
Talent shortages aren’t just a recruiting problem
Sarah Duguay’s presentation reframed the labour gap as something broader than a hiring challenge.
“It’s not just a recruiting issue,” she said during the fireside chat. “There’s an opportunity to really look at developing your talent inside … how you’re moving talent through the organization. So I think you have to holistically look at the challenge and not just … target one particular area or think that it’s a recruiting problem.”
At Endress+Hauser Canada, she said, that shows up as a policy of not laying people off during downturns — instead retraining, upskilling and repurposing roles so the company isn’t scrambling to rehire when business picks back up.
It also shows up in how the company hires. Rather than looking for finished skill sets, HR and the managing director sit in on every final interview to assess for attitude and aptitude. ”
We can teach anybody anything about instrumentation or anything else that we need to teach them,” Duguay said, “but you can’t really teach someone to care or to be open-minded and curious.”
Treat the shortage as structural, not cyclical
Both speakers pushed back on the idea that the current labour market is a temporary rough patch.
“You really have to treat the shortage as structural,” Duguay said. “This is not going away.”
Her advice was to hire ahead of retirement gaps rather than react to them, and to build flexibility into how people exit — Endress+Hauser offers phased retirement (reduced hours or days at proportionally reduced pay) and brings long-serving colleagues back on contract, which keeps institutional knowledge in the building and gives a designated successor time to overlap and absorb it, sometimes for six months or more on technical roles.
Bieler made a similar point from the systems level, arguing that organizations making the most progress “aren’t treating workforce development reactively, they’re treating it as part of the infrastructure that enables growth,” on par with how they’d treat a physical supply chain.
The 10-year pipeline starts in high school
The hardest thing to fix, according to Bieler, is how young people picture manufacturing careers in the first place.
“Young people can’t choose careers they can’t picture,” he said, pointing out that many students still associate industrial work with outdated stereotypes rather than robotics, automation and the technical problem-solving actually happening on shop floors today.
His prescription was direct engagement, such as career talks in high schools, work placements and participation in programs like Ontario’s Specialist High Skills Major, delivered well before students are choosing a post-secondary or apprenticeship pathway. That kind of early exposure, he said, “has a positive impact on youth employment outcomes,” and pays off years down the line: it “can help reshape perceptions of manufacturing and heavy industry.”
Watch the entire webinar on demand here.
