Leveraging the skills of knowledge workers

Across the industrialized world, governments have adopted a human resource-based model of economic development. Enabling citizens to acquire knowledge, skills and education is a necessary but no longer sufficient condition for economic success. Equally crucial is ensuring that past investments have the intended social and economic payoffs. The next generation of policy must strive to create the enabling conditions for the use and further development of human capital at the point where it can be most fully realized — within workplaces. This article focuses on the demand for human capital, assessing how well Canada is doing to maximize the returns on existing human capital investments among the highly educated.