Strong career development is key to boosting Canada’s productivity.

By Emma James

Canada has a productivity problem.

Canada’s gross domestic product per capita (a proxy for standard of living) continues to underperform compared to other OECD countries. As our population grows rapidly, real GDP per capita is still trending downward, hovering around reduced output levels not seen since 2017. Business owners are feeling the impact, citing productivity challenges as a top concern.

What can business leaders, owners, and employers do about low productivity? First, two types of productivity challenges need to be understood: macro and micro.

Macro productivity challenges refer to the large-scale obstacles that hinder an economy’s overall efficiency and output, such as rising inflation, cost of inputs, interest rates, and debt-related costs. Micro productivity challenges are more granular obstacles that occur at an individual or team level, such as recruitment and retention of skilled employees and overall labour shortages.

To fix our productivity problem, Canada needs to address not only economic performance or the output of labour (macro), but also the input of labour (micro). While leaders, economists, and commentators propose solutions, they often miss an essential part of the equation: how real people do their work.

To increase Canada’s productivity, workers need stronger career development.

Career development is the lifelong process of managing learning, work, leisure, and transitions to move toward a personally determined, evolving, and preferred future.

For workers, a lack of career development knowledge and skills can lead to unclear work and career goals, ineffective job matching, limited growth opportunities, inadequate networking, low confidence, and poor work-life balance. None of this is good for individual workers or overall economic productivity.

It’s equally important for business leaders and employers to have a strong understanding of how to help their workers navigate their careers. This is called career management, and it’s different than performance management. In particular, it can help business leaders and employers improve worker engagement.

Real opportunity to increase micro productivity lies in prioritizing worker engagement. People who are meaningfully engaged are more likely to be invested in their work and what it accomplishes. They are motivated to contribute to their organization’s success and are typically enthusiastic, dedicated, and absorbed in their work. They go beyond the basic requirements of their job, foster innovation, and seek continuous improvement. High worker engagement leads to high retention of skilled employees.

Pickerell and Neault’s Career Engagement Model (Figure 1) is a valuable tool for business leaders and employers to understand what they should focus on to optimize worker engagement. The model emphasizes the importance of balancing work challenges (interesting, thought-provoking) and capacity (skills, resources, support) and demonstrates that optimal engagement occurs when there is an appropriate match between these two elements.

If the demands or tasks that a worker must accomplish are too challenging, they become overwhelmed and eventually disengaged. If they are not challenged enough or don’t have the right capacity, they become underutilized and eventually disengaged. Proper worker engagement isn’t a one-time issue you can complete and then forget about it. Rather, it requires ongoing (re)balance and (re)alignment as both their work and work-life profile shift.

Figure 1. Career Engagement Model, modified from Pickerell and Neault (2016). 

The nature of work and workplaces is changing, impacting different workers at different times along the challenge and capacity dimensions. While much of the focus is on adjusting contracts and policy, addressing worker productivity is better addressed through intentional shifts in relationships. Both employers and workers know that changes to work and workplaces are taking place. Both need to craft and understand new aspects of the social contracts they share and what they owe each other. This shift can optimize engagement for micro productivity gains.

The employer-worker relationship needs to be strong enough to address when changes at work or situations at home pose too much challenge or lead to a lack of capacity. It also needs to identify and respond when a need or new challenge arises, or when additional capacity is required. This is a system and workforce management issue. Leaders can accomplish this type of critical relationship with staff by investing in career development.

Careers are lifelong, individualized, and tied to labour markets. Career development is a far more appropriate discipline to base workforce relationships on today’s changing world of work than industrial-age human resource management policies. By equipping employers and workers alike with proper career development, workers will thrive in their work and increase overall productivity.

Helping workers find their Career SweetSpot is one practical way managers can improve worker engagement, career development, and productivity (Figure 2). A person’s Career SweetSpot is the balanced combination of what they need from their work, what talents and skills they bring to work, what they are passionate about (what matters to them), and what impact they want their work to have (what problem exists in the market that needs attention). When organizations are made up of people whose work aligns with their Career SweetSpot, productivity increases.

Figure 2. Career SweetSpot.

If we want different results, we need different investments.

Canada’s productivity problem is complex and requires solutions that address both macro and micro challenges. At the individual and organizational levels, career development plays a crucial role in boosting productivity.

Maximizing workers’ output potential will never succeed if we only focus on ensuring they meet quotas or performance targets or complete assigned tasks and duties. These are important metrics, but they won’t solve Canada’s productivity problem alone.

More broadly, productivity is about maximizing resources—and that includes people. Helping Canadians build meaningful, fulfilling careers, rather than only matching jobs to skills, is essential to building a productive, competitive Canada. This means investing in career development supports, including training for employers and tools that help workers align their extrinsic motivations (what is expected by others) with their intrinsic motivations (what they inherently want to do).

When Canadians are engaged and work in their Career SweetSpot, attrition drops, output increases, and innovation flourishes. Most importantly, real people thrive.