[Except where otherwise indicated, the speaker is Greg Boyd, SVP Revenue @ Uvaro]

We're gonna get started with our conversation today about how to scale Canada's cleantech workforce. I am thrilled that you've chosen to take some time to be with us this afternoon and look forward to spending some time walking through some interesting content, some interesting material and I hope that we have a good time while we're here as well.

So just seeing the numbers tick up, I think we're just about ready to rock and roll. Ok, we're gonna get started. Others will join as we get rolling and to those of you who are watching the recording.

Good afternoon and I hope that you're having a good finish to your 2023. What we're gonna talk about today is gonna give us a chance to both frame up your 2023 and how to close it out. But also, and probably more, how you might want to think about making 2024 a success for your organization.

So to get us started, I just want to say hello. For those of you who have not met me before, my name is Greg Boyd. I'm super duper vice president of revenue at Uvaro.

And for those of you who are not sure, and you're wondering who is Uvaro and why are we hosting a webinar on the topic of clean tech? I want to start with a spoiler that Uvaro is not an expert in the clean tech space. Many of you who are joining us in the call today are, and we're grateful for the time you're choosing to spend some time with us.

What we are though is experts in the space of training for new skill sets or upskilling or reskilling members of our workforce to enter new and fast growing industries. We've upskilled or reskilled at Uvaro thousands of North Americans and a handful of internationals over the past four years as part of our membership based program and I partner with a number of organizations now who have audiences that they're looking to or that we're working to upskill or reskill.

So wherever you're joining us from, we just welcome you today. If you're part of a clean tech organization that's looking to hire, if you're part of a career development, or if you are a career development professional looking to help people make the transition into clean tech, or if you're just interested in the Clean tech space. Our intent today is that you leave with some useful context for how you think about engaging with the workforce as we head into 2024 and then in the years ahead.

While we're not experts in the clean tech space, we do want to do a little bit of a level set on what's happening in the fast-growing cleantech segment.

We've aggregated some content together that we’ll share

We consolidated research that will bring together our point of view around it

We'll take some time to reframe what we think the right approach is to take to drive workforce development

And we'll look at it in two parts:

from the perspective of employers looking to hire

for learning providers

Don’t worry—I'll give you some steps that you can think about taking to start solving this challenge today as you make your plans for 2024. But what I also want to cover is what this webinar is not.

I've been to many webinars as I'm sure you have too, that are strong. It's maybe a bit entertaining or engaging, there's some good content, but then it quickly turns into a product demo or pitch and you end up feeling very much that you've wasted your time, not getting insights that are meaningful to you, but being led down a path to buy a product or service.

Those are annoying to me and I'm sure they're annoying to you as well.

So while we're not gonna do that, I will come clean: I am going to attempt to lead you to a conclusion that Uvaro and the work we do at Uvaro is part of the solution to building a strong workforce for the clean tech sector.

But what's cool about this challenge is that there is not a single solution and there's not a single provider that can solve this challenge. It's something that we need to work out together.

So our hope is that we can lead you to the conclusion that we're part of this solution. And perhaps you may be an organization or a service provider who we can work with to help solve this problem.

So to be clear: not a pitch, not a demo, there will not even be a customer testimonial as we go through this conversation. It will be a conversation based in fact, it will also not be a critique of public policy. We're gonna delve a little bit into what's happening today, which will take us into a little bit of what's happening in terms of policy.

But I will not state any of our opinions, and we will not debate them. That's not what we're here to do because we're also not experts in that. We will also not recap for you and explain to the professionals in the room what cleantech is—we feel like you have that well in hand.

And what this also is not is it is not a recording. We are LIVE, ladies and gentlemen, so I can make mistakes. I can trip up. That also means that you have the opportunity to ask questions along the way.

My wonderful colleague Toya Rivail is here. She's helping to monitor that Q and A. So as you have questions that arise, Toya, I will welcome you to call them out so that we can have a few moments to address that Q&A at a few natural points in the conversation.

To do a quick test: Toya — Are there any questions yet that need to be addressed?

[Toya]

There are no questions yet, but I'm ready whenever they are.

[Greg]

All right. Thank you, Toya. And thank you everyone for being here. Let's dig in and start the conversation now on the cleantech space and the workforce gaps that we need to fill as we go into 2024.

 So again, we don't claim to be experts, but let's start with setting a bit of context about what's happening in the clean tech environment as it pertains to Canada. And I will say again, the facts that we're laying out today, we've done our best to consolidate. If there's something that doesn't seem quite right. Please don't blame the messenger. We'll blame the reference material.

But we are providing a resource at the end of this webinar where you will have access to a whole set of reference material that you can dig into a lot of the references and resources that we're consolidating for our research and for our work with partners. So here we go!

In Canada, we have a tendency to not appreciate the work we're doing to drive progress in the world. But from a policy and state of the world perspective, it's easy for us to often say that we're simply just not doing enough. But we are doing something and we're disproportionately performing at a successful rate as it pertains to our ranking in the Clean Tech Global Innovation Index in North America, where we've continuously been climbing since it was launched, presently sitting at second place.

And in terms of our ranking as a country, that makes it possible for clean tech innovation to come forward and be commercialized. So it's something to be proud of as a starting point that not only are we ranked, but we are moving up the rankings and making progress. So while we're not doing all that we can, certainly, here in Canada, we should be proud of the work that's being done. We have a little bit more information about how those rankings are formed in that reference document that's coming out at the end of the webinar.

The other portion of the story is that we have a disproportionate impact in terms of the size of our population to the amount of innovation that we bring forward on the world stage. So less than a half percent of the global population, but 12 of the top 100 ranked clean tech companies in 2023 are here in Canada. And again, something for us to say, well done, we're off to a good start, something to be proud of. We have a good foundation.

You can see more information about how or what these different companies are and how these rankings are done in that resource pack that is coming.

Now, the progress we're making as a country I like to think is a reflection in a lot of ways of our values in Canada. We tend to value our environment, we value innovation, risk, taking all these things to bring new innovation forward. But candidly, it's also a reflection of where the supports are flowing to.

This is just a small snapshot of the massive funding pool in support of programming that is being built and set aside by the federal government to help drive innovation.

This is not all to clean tech, but cleantech squarely falls into it as an area of innovation that the Canadian government federally is working toward funding in order to get organizations off the ground, so that Canada has a seat at the international table in this fast-growing space, the government set aside over $2 billion over the next 3 to 5 years across all these different sectors to make this funding available.

Now at Uvaro, we've already successfully gained access to some of this funding in different pools, partnering with organizations to help with the upskilling and retraining of people to enter the workforce in some of these innovative segments. And we'll talk a little bit more about that later in the discussion.

But as before if you're attending and you see some acronyms or some different groups, funding pools that you are not familiar with. I suspect you're familiar with a lot of these, the reference guide that we have at the end will give some more helpful detail to you on what these different funding bodies and funding pools are.

And if you're looking to take advantage of some of those. It's a great way to learn more about those funding opportunities.

Now, funding alone though will not drive progress and change.

There are more and different pieces to the puzzle that have put Canada on the map from a clean tech perspective. So we've already talked briefly and alluded to there being federal funding that's available to help seed innovation and get it off to the start. There's the values component of the Canadian entrepreneur, the Canadian spirit of valuing clean technologies and innovative technologies to have entrepreneurs and startups create an environment where innovation can happen. This we could argue is working today. We've got a foundation of success that we can say we can build upon.

But there's some other pieces of the puzzle to make all of this work. And our point of view on this breaks it down into three different pieces. I wanna talk a little bit more about these through the next 15 minutes or so.

The first is strategic support. So this strategic support when we talk about this, it's not just about funding sources. So providing funding to get organizations off the ground, but providing recurring pools of resources and creating incentives for organizations and consumers to get ongoing access to new technologies.

Second is agencies and accelerators. This goes beyond strategic support and goes beyond funding and gets into regional and tactical support to build out organizations, build out functions that can provide tactical support so that companies can grow and consumers can get supports they need to access different tech.

This is, organizations that we're quite familiar with, like the Accelerator Center in Waterloo and Innovation Guelph, that are feet-on-the-ground, providing direct support to organizations to help drive these new innovations, these new industry sectors forward and get them from nothing, zero, into something and something meaningful.

And then the third piece of what puts all this together and brings the ecosystem together is a critical component that's easy to overlook: the Canadian workforce. So we're resilient, we're adaptable and open to new challenges. But companies and whole economies can't grow without a workforce that's there with the skills needed to drive the innovation and success of this new and emerging sector.

So while we're saying that yes, to some degree, this is working today, we're on the map, North America ranked, we're leading in our part of the world. We've got a role to play on the world stage. Absolutely.

The simple truth is we all know as a group gathered today that this segment, this industry is only going to grow, it's going to become more intensely competitive. It's gonna get and receive more funding around the world. So, while we're in a good position today, Canada and Canadian organizations aren't in the position where we can sit back and just think that what we're doing is good enough.

More needs to be done and it's specifically more that needs to be done in this middle tier of strategic support agencies and accelerators in the Canadian workforce to make sure that Canada's role in being a regional leader and growing into an international leader is something that we can successfully and effectively achieve. So I'm gonna pause briefly in case there's something that came up.

[Toya]

I'm so glad that you did because there is, we have a question about, well, I'll just read it exactly as it's written here. And it is: "Are there provincial funding programs that make sense to tap into as well?"

[Greg]

I think that there are. I won't delve into the specifics, but federal funding and provincial funding sources we could almost think of... In our context — for how we're talking about it today, is being similar that it's funding sources that are, that are starting at a sort of macro level to seed innovation in the regions that they're meaning to support. So I think that this model still applies in that within Ontario as an example, you have provincial funding and then support accelerators and a workforce within Ontario. Absolutely. When we look across the country and I know we have attendees and viewers of this webinar watching across the country, we chose to keep it at that federal level just to start with a more macro view, but provincial supports are absolutely relevant as well.

Toya made mention of it too in the chat, but just to reinforce, we will have and do have included in that resource pack, federal funding sources as well as a number of provincial funding sources that are available to be tapped into.

Thank you. Thank you for the question. We're alive out there. That's part one: We survived. We're gonna delve into a little bit more detail on these gap areas and I'm gonna spend five or six minutes, and we're gonna go into the first two strategic supports and the role of agencies and accelerators as these things we're doing.

Ok right, now that we're making progress, absolutely there are things we can be doing better. But where we're gonna focus the majority of our conversation, and the brunt of the time together, is on that third one, the workforce disconnect, where we're seeing the biggest and most urgent need. But also where all of us gathered on this call today have an opportunity to drive the biggest impact.

But let's unpack first, this area of strategic supports and the role of agencies and accelerators, just to give a bit more context around it. So again, when we say strategic supports, what we mean is that these are supports that exist in a variety of incentives for businesses, nonprofits and consumers to support different clean tech options, things like tax credits or having knowledge hubs, ways to access resources and information and to support a new industry sector or segment. But there are gaps.

So we have something today that could be better. So one of the gaps that we see is declining incentives in the marketplace for consumers, just as an example, but also how we allocate these sorts of incentives.

I like to joke for a good friend of mine who's a Tesla driver, that rebates are lower a lot than they used to be for those. But the real question is strategic supports to help reduce the overall cost of manufacturing for all electric vehicles, just as a simple example, so that those savings can be passed along to consumers. That's a more sustainable type of strategic support that is not federally funded, it's not provincially funded, it is just a market force that takes over.

So Canada's ongoing investment here, and while there's gaps, Canada is making more investments and looking at ways to increase the supports that are available specifically for the clean tech industry segment. This commentary comes through at all levels of government as well.

And we're delving into that political space right now.

What do you not talk about at the family dinner? I think it's politics, religion.

Yes, but we're talking briefly about politics to say that this notion of clean technology, emerging technologies, is prominent, and our budget is prominent by the leaders of all parties to varying degrees, as it pertains to what are the conversations that we need to be having from an economic perspective?

I personally attended a session of parliament a few weeks ago and of the 10 questions that were asked during question period, seven of those questions were directly related to the environment, the environment and the economy, and the questions that were not explicitly about that were redirected back to some form of government policy related to it whether it's carbon, carbon sequestering, carbon taxing, or different clean innovations and technologies that were happening.

So there's commentary at all levels of government, whether it's conservative or any of our liberal parties, for supporting this conversation, about driving a conversation, about clean technologies and emerging technologies. Further, those tax credits are a critical part, and they're designed to turn the flywheel, to create those market forces, so that it can move from tax credits and rebates to having the market forces drive the interest in these new business segments, as opposed to needing to be funded provincially or federally.

So these investments are being made whether you like it or not, and we could debate for the rest of the time, we're together, whether it's well allocated or poorly allocated. But we are as a country are putting our money to some degree where our mouths are, to say that we want to be a player in the clean tech sector, the clean tech space, allocating billions in investments, in tax rebates and refunds, both for consumers and for businesses to try to get this industry segment stood up and going. But it isn't just dollars and rebates.

There are also services that are being provided. The clean growth hub started all the way back, what feels like 1000 years ago in 2017, to provide foundational services to organizations that were trying to innovate and get off the ground. Much like an accelerator would but from a federal support level to provide supports to get organizations started in the clean tech segment.

There's more information about it, if you're not familiar with the clean growth hub, as I wasn't before, then you will have access to resources about the clean growth hub in that resource pack that is coming your way. Now, all this is that we're making good progress and we are. But as I alluded to before, when we think about strategic supports, we need to move beyond spending and more and have structure in place so that market forces themselves, sustain the changes and that we no longer require tax dollars and federal spending to bring clean tech into the mainstream. So there's more we can be doing here as a country. Absolutely.

But this is a policy conversation and we're not here to talk about politics, so I can already hear the Q&A thread. I sense it's starting to blow up there. I will not offer opinions on political parties or leanings. I'm providing some context. We're proud of and happy with the investments being made, but this is not what we want to focus our energy on for today's conversation.

Strategic supports are needed and we're making progress there. We could argue about whether they're the right ones. The point is there are investments being made.

So I'll move on to the next one and then I'll pause for Q and A. In case some questions did come up. The second that we want to allude to, as one of these factors in driving success is the role of agencies and accelerators. This is a little less controversial. And we'll be able to move through this probably with a little less heartburn.

On the topic of regional agencies and local accelerators: First off, when we talk about a regional agency, there might be a question of why do we even have them at all? We've got the federal government providing resources like the clean growth hub. Why do we need some more localized supports?

The key point here is that localized version of support, as we'll see in more detail in a few moments, provide both the services that organizations need in those locals. Much like that question about provincial support, this is, then, supports for organizations specifically and services to get the resources that they need to be successful.

But also it provides a bridge to federal funding and federal support. There's things that are working but there are things that need to change. So while we do have these regional agencies and supports, and I know some of you here are in this call and are would identify as being one of these regional agencies and would empathize with this under-funded, under-resourced and that can impact the ability that these organizations have to deliver the best impact, the highest level of impact.

Because if we're under-resourced and we're supposed to be delivering knowledge and innovation to support the businesses and the people in a region or sector, if we don't have the resources to fund, getting the best people or getting the best resources, we can't effectively deliver on that outcome, which can be a frustration in terms of where we sit.

So while there's a foundation of regional supports, more investment is needed and they're needed to make sure that we're effectively providing the level of service that companies actually need to be competitive, not just within Canada, but on an international stage as well.

If you take a look at this map, you can just get a quick glimpse to clean tech organizations and alliances that exist across the country. And we do have a number of specific organizations that exist to provide those supports listed there. But when you step back, there's some gaps, not necessarily equal representation, there's regional disparity, specifically to the northern territories of our country where we, where we have gaps in those regional supports, though this content and programming is based on data that was rooted back in 2014, 2015.

It doesn't take into account innovations like how AI is changing the workforce, and then scale is hard. You can only imagine how a clean tech organization in Alberta might look compared to a clean tech organization in Nova Scotia, they're gonna be dramatically different that makes it difficult to scale and makes it difficult to fund effectively. So "how can you get efficiency when the needs are just so different across these different regions?" is a real question.

Switching gears then to accelerators, specifically accelerators differing from these regional partners in that they're specifically there to provide tactical hands-on services to companies that are operating and functioning in the clean tech space. We should be thrilled to see that there's a number of accelerators across the country, some of which we know well, like the Accelerator Center or Mars here in Ontario, Volta, out in Nova Scotia, Foresight on the west coast, that provide programming specifically for clean tech companies. And that's an amazing thing, amazing that we've made that progress. So that's good.

But the gaps still exist from the perspective that countrywide support is difficult because clean tech companies look different in each part of the country.

Secondly, accelerators and incubators rely heavily on seasoned veterans to come in and offer their expertise and perspective and in many areas, there are not clean tech veterans, that are able to come in and offer that perspective and experience.

And further, we've seen accelerators and incubators start to grow in other parts of the world and it makes it easy for Canadian companies to access those services in other parts of the world. That also, once you're there, makes it easy to access funding and resourcing that turns you from a Canadian company into a international company.

So we see leakage of companies that may get their funding or may get their supports from other parts of the world. So there's more that we certainly could be doing here when founders go into accelerators. This survey was done of over 400 clean tech founders at the end of 2022. So good recent data for us, we see. Yes, R and D is that top left bar, about 64% of companies are looking for support in research and development. That's not surprising. However, the chunk of the data, suggests that what is really required is, once I get past my basic R and D needs, it's a shift to go to market and I need to actually have services and support for bringing my product to market.

This is human capital that's required. It's about connections, it's about skills. It's about expertise. This is related to the people who are working inside the organizations. R and D is technical skills and we can give support for that through very technical education, very technical profiling. But when it comes to going to market, this is about people. It's about the workforce.

I think you can see where I'm going here. So it's great to see that we have agencies and accelerators that are in place that are being stood up and being funded to provide these foundational services. Market forces certainly are helping to drive this. But again, it's not working as well as it could be and we're not here to solve that problem.

No, no one of us is here to set up an accelerator or an incubator. That's not what the conversation is about. It's something that we can give some perspective on, but it's not what we're going to focus on today.

What we do wanna focus on for the balance of our time together is in this third area, this idea of the workforce disconnect. This is what we can affect change on, this is what we can work together and collaborate to support. And this is also the area where there is the most urgent need for there to be investment development and growth.

I'll do a quick pause, Toya, in case some questions do come in, I saw some activity on the Q and A. I'm not sure if there are any questions that were helpful to hit on.

[Toya]

Thank you for the pause. There was one question and it is: "If I chase down this funding and then there's an election and the government changes, will the partisanship put my business at risk?"

[Greg]

I think, in my experience, whether it's in instruction or in this sort of format of speaking, the most annoying answer to any question when somebody asks it is "it depends." So I won't specifically say it depends and let it hang.

…

But I will say that the way funding sources are being allocated today does make it such that some of those funding sources can be written out and granted upfront so that the dollars are made available, and they're yours to access and use.

However, we have seen cases where upon review, some of those resources can be pulled back because an agency isn't delivering on the promises that they committed to, or business isn't. So to some degree, those funds are always at risk if the promise isn't being delivered upon effectively.

But I would say that with partisanship and with changing governments, it would behoove those of you who asked the question, and anyone listening, to ensure that when the funding is allocated, that when the dollars are received would be critical, because any multi-year funding programs would likely be put at some degree of risk with a full whole scale changing of government.

I'd welcome some more dialogue on that topic as a follow up, but that would be the way I'd answer the question just to delve in. Thank you for the question.

[Toya]

Thanks Greg.

[Greg]

Beautiful. We are going deep now into the workforce disconnect. Because plainly put, we talked a little bit about this, the different components that build up the clean tech funding and support ecosystem in Canada. Funding is there.

We talked now just a little bit about strategic support agencies and accelerators for context. But the Canadian workforce specifically is where is the most critical component of Canada's ability to stay competitive, not just next year, but in the whole decade ahead. And while we're seeing some signs of progress, the workforce is our single biggest barrier to scale, and there is a critical disconnect that's happened, and is happening here.

So what do we mean by the workforce disconnect? Effectively, companies are run by people. We have a workforce that plainly put is not seasoned in the clean tech space. That means as clean tech businesses grow, they will quickly outgrow the capacity of our workforce to support them.

The traditional education system on its own is not equipped for this because it takes a long time. We still have textbooks that are being used in many of these institutions. And when I say traditional education system, that takes a long time, it's the public school system, secondary school, post-secondary, they're not set up to support a specific innovation or innovative leap into the clean tech space.

So we need to find another way. Companies are looking for a range of skills in order to stay competitive. So many innovative companies at the earliest stages, as we talked a little bit about before, are looking for those R and D skills, applied technical sciences, they're looking for technical skills enabled to be successful. But as you can see from this chart, so this is again that survey that was done, clean tech founders at the end of 2022.

As organizations mature and start to move into servicing a market, there's a rapid need to build those business administration and customer facing capacities. So these become the dominant resource gaps and resource needs, once you shift from research and development into market activation.

So we've spent time and resources, building technical competencies and investing heavily in engineering and other technical competencies. There has not been a whole scale investment or focus by our traditional education systems into building those administration, and go to market skill sets. It simply has not been done.

If we look across the country, the patterns at a broad scale look quite similar: Technical skills across the country, and the lead companies saying what we need first is technical skills. But again, once you get past research and development and start go to market, the technical skill need drops.

And we need companies to be in a space where they're going to market, if we want to maintain any sort of leadership position. If I go one level deeper... All I did in that chart: if I go back, and then I go forward, same chart, just eliminated that technical view. ...So you can see the disparity as we look region by region across Canada. And you can see the different skills, the different regions, that entrepreneurs are looking for, very widely.

This means that a federal program macro approach to solving a workforce problem simply won't work. The regional services that we have set up and put in place are there to support businesses and connect them to innovation, but they're not there to provide any solutions related directly to workforce and to individual human capital development. That's just not what their role is in our system.

Now, the challenge doesn't just end with sourcing talent for companies that are in this space. Once companies do find talent, they do struggle to retain the talent.

So the same study, this chart looks at "once you have for companies that have found talent." What are your biggest barriers to retaining and engaging that talent? And salaries and wages are the primary concern for businesses. That's fairly well connected to what we see outside of the clean tech sector, especially in our our current high inflation environment. But the real challenge is if you look closer. So on the side with the legend, and pair that legend to the data in the bar graph, the majority of the clean tech founders are facing barriers to be able to find or train the people that they need to grow, that limits our ability to grow scale and compete. Then on the national or international stage, this pattern, if we delve into the regional data, looks the same region by region.

That companies have a challenge of finding the right talent. But also they have a challenge of retaining the talent that they get in the doors and giving them or developing or growing the skills of what they need and need in place to serve the organizations. So we have a gap both in terms of the knowledge and experience that companies need to hire for and for how they can sustain the talent. Once they get them into their organizations, we're sitting at number two in North America today. And you could argue that we should be proud of that.

What we're doing today is got us to where we are, but it will not work to scale Canadian clean tech companies into the future, and we will fall behind. Absolutely. So I said this a little bit before: This is the most urgent gap that exists.

Funding doesn't move quickly. Programming doesn't move quickly, but talent is something that we can grow and develop quickly and companies need it today. January 1, there will be job postings for different companies to bring the right talent into their organizations. And arguably a lot of those organizations don't have the right talent inside their businesses today. So it's both urgent and a critical gap that we need to close in order for Canada to stay competitive on an international stage.

But my friends, we're all gathered here today and you're watching this recording because you believe that there must be some sort of solution, that there must be some sort of hope. And there is the federal funding that has been made available that we talked about, before some of it is allocated and set aside to give to the right organizations that can come together, work together, regional agencies, employers, training partners, to deliver learning services to help businesses find the talent that they need to grow their businesses.

This is what we're gonna focus on for the last 20 minutes of our conversation today, and we're gonna start talking about solutions in this conversation. As I said, at the start, we need to be in this together. So this is the part of the webinar that would typically turn into demo mode, if I had a solution for you, with a series of customer stories and you just say "that was nice" and you would tune out and say goodbye.

But this is the time to lean in because this is how we work at solving this problem together, because it's going to take collaboration to build the knowledge and experiences that we need for our workforce to grow So there is a way forward.

Let's talk about how we build a robust clean tech workforce and how we do that together. So there are two sides of the equation to consider here as we look at solving this challenge. On the first side is hiring. So businesses need to look, or businesses typically look, for knowledge and experience to fill gaps in their organizations in order to help them grow.

The way that companies, if you're an organization in the clean tech space, you're listening today and you're thinking about how do I find and source the right talent, the way you're doing it needs to change. We'll talk about how you can do that. If you're part of the audience that's here, where you have either an audience that you serve from a career development perspective, or you're an agency that offers supports and you have an audience that you serve, the way people need to build knowledge and experience needs to change.

The traditional approach simply will not continue to work. So if we do need another way that fits the long-term and short-term needs. Let's work through what those might look like. And let's start with the approach that companies need to take to hiring and we'll return to some of the data that we were looking at before actually.

So we identified that outside of salaries and wages, having the right knowledge and experience is a critical challenge to keeping employees in their roles, whether they choose to leave on their own or whether companies make the decision for those employees that they need to leave. So these data points that we have highlighted point out that skills aren't there from the start.

There's a need for reskilling. And if that's the case, that can be difficult to provide. But also this point of competition, more traditional high paying industries like finance and tech can attract employees and pull them out of this clean tech segment, and employees will return to the segments where they're more traditionally employed or engaged. That means that 56% of companies won't be able to find or train the skills that they need in order to grow their businesses with the workforce that we have. This isn't all that inspiring.

So I keep bringing you down and I would apologize for that, but I'm gonna bring a little levity to the situation by suggesting that we do a little exercise together. So let's let's do that. We're gonna do a little exercise.

For those of you wearing Bluetooth headsets, if you've wandered off, this is a good time to come back. I'll give you a moment to do that and hear your feet running back to the computer. For those of you multitasking, I know you're out there, tsk tsk. But come on back. Come on back.

Make sure you see on your screen, the shapes I'm showing you showing you on our slides. There's no shame in multitasking, especially at this point in the afternoon, but it's time to dial it in if only for a couple of moments. We're gonna do this exercise together.

So what I'd like you to do is take a look at the screen. I'm gonna give you 15 seconds and I'd like you to find the circle below. So go ahead and take a look and see if you can find it. Now, about five more seconds.

Ok. Now, if we were in a live room together, I would hear shuffling of feet, irritation pencils being dropped. I think there'd be some discussing, people think that I've lost my mind because you would say, well, this just simply isn't fair. There is no circle.

Are you showing me the right slide? Maybe some of you are doing that. I saw the Q and A light up.

Um, there isn't a circle here. So it was a trick question. Now, if I pissed you off, I'm sorry. But there's a point to what I'm trying to get at and it relates to how companies approach their search for talent.

The bottom line is this: Humans are good at saying, humans are good at looking for what they have found in the past. Let's say that again, human beings are good at looking for what they have found in the past, applied in this context. If a hiring manager has hired squares, triangles trapezoids in the past, that's what they, they will look for in the future. But quite often as we get into new and innovative sectors, what we actually need is circles. But if we've never looked for a circle before, starting down that path can feel daunting.

 Although we need a circle, we gravitate towards searching for the things that we found in the past, the square, the triangle and the trapezoid.

OK. So how do we solve for that?

There is a different approach that you can take. If you're an employer, you're looking to develop and grow your talent, there's an approach to how you can do this. It's called skills-based hiring. And this can help switch the search for talent from one that's locked into traditional methods where you're looking for experience, or looking for knowledge and experience, to one where you're looking for the skills that you need to drive your business forward.

This is what the clean tech industry needs to consider. So here's a definition for you of what it is. But to summarize, skills based hiring is an approach that shifts from seeking out specific knowledge and experience, to looking at what is needed in order to help your business grow, to help anchor this.

Let me share an example. So here's what a set of traditional job requirements would look like for a sales manager role. It's fairly standard. It appeals to a wide network of people from across multiple industries who can apply for the role.

Experience: how many times you've done something, where you've been in the past, what you've done in the past that would make you qualified for a role.

This is fairly typical and frankly, it's how I've written a lot of my job descriptions for years. If we switch to a skills-based hiring approach, we look at things through a different lens, we look at things through the lens of job responsibilities.

Now we're looking for skills. We're looking for someone who can lead reports, someone who can deliver biweekly pipeline presentations.

To put it another way: the sales manager smashed quota for years in the tech industry. Does that immediately mean that they will be successful in the clean tech field? A new innovative space they haven't been in before, because it's not possible for them to have been in that field before. For many clean tech companies, no one has done it before.

We need more circles. We need to think about a different way to do that. The way the language reflects the difference here is very important. It's nuanced, but it's important because not only is it the words in the description, but it frames the thinking about what an organization is looking for.

If you describe your needs as a hiring company through the lens of the skills that I need to have, you wind up not with somebody who is a sales manager, but somebody with skills that can be applied in a variety of ways. And especially for some of those earlier stage companies where you're needing to grow and needing to get and attract the right talent.

It's a great way to get the right people on the bus. Not only does that approach work, not only does that approach sound good in principle, but it works in practice as well, where companies that post with this view toward responsibilities instead of requirements do get higher rates of applications. So it does prove out very effectively to be a way to get more applicants in, to broaden the source, the pool of talent that you're looking to source from.

Included in the resource materials: We have an overview. So if you're a company that's looking for a way to hire and change the way you're thinking about bringing talent into your organization, we have a framework that will include it.

But we're gonna move on to the other side of the equation here, which is not just in companies that are looking to hire. But if you're an organization that has a population of people that you're trying to develop skills for, there's a new approach that needs to be applied.

Companies in the clean tech space are looking for talent simply that isn't there yet. And so while they can change their approach for how they look for talent, there still will be gaps in terms of what type of skills people have and what they can bring to the table.

Two approaches to consider here in terms of building our national workforce capacity.

First is considering how do we train new workers bringing new people into the workforce? And broadly speaking, there's three buckets, there is education institutions, specifically, we focus on college and university, there's vocational or technical institutes, and then there's boot camp style programming.

On the other side, there's skilled workers, people who are working today and thinking about "how do we reshape the talent that we have?", reskilling that workforce.

And again, we've got three approaches there that typically are taken: corporate training providers, online learning platforms for online learning skills. And then again, boot camp style programming is available for those as well. Let's take a very quick look at the pros and cons of each across three different perspectives:

(1) Incentives — that is, does the provider offer an end result or solution that is value to the learner?

(2) Cost — Is there a barrier to cost? Is it expensive or is it affordable? and

(3) Speed — How quickly can we actually address the the gap that we have for developing new talent for industry?

If you do an assessment of each of these, you can see that while educational institutions offer high degree of incentive: a certification that is highly regarded and highly valuable, to me, it's incredibly expensive. It's gonna take a long time, let alone the amount of time for organizations to develop programming in these institutions.

Vocational and technical institutes: similarly strong accreditation come with them. It's still highly expensive. And while they'll be faster than traditional education institutions, it still takes a high amount of time to complete those programmings and we still have to deal or contend with the amount of time it will take to develop the programming in the first place.

On the third venue of boot camp style programming: With this we have a lower incentive because what is a certificate from boot camp ABC versus an education institution? It doesn't carry the same weight, but it's far more cost effective and it's faster. And in the game that we're talking about playing, how do we close the talent cap in 2024?

No solution is perfect, but boot camp style programming offers some clear benefits. Switching gears, with the same set of parameters to evaluate reskilling and upskilling: the corporate training, online training or boot camp style programming.

We get to a similar result, expensive, slow corporate training opportunities, online training programs that are affordable but are questionable in quality or boot camp style programming where they're gonna be expensive relative to online training programs, but much more affordable than corporate training. Bootcamp style programming emerges as a highly effective approach to build skills organically in populations to help enable our workforce.

No solution is perfect. But this one comes out ahead. The question that this brings me to is why the boot camp model isn't more widely applied to solve some of these challenges and to me it's a simple answer: The boot camp model has many flaws. Key things the boot camp model gets wrong is that they offer promise, but they've had a bad rap in terms of what they're able to deliver.

And speaking very plainly, some boot camp programs simply are just scams, and it's tough to discern for a consumer, which is which, what are the good ones and which ones are not.

Speaking very plainly again, Uvaro ourselves, we used to brand ourselves as a boot camp and we had great success taking that approach for a period of time. We helped our members get to high employment outcomes. And that was remarkable. But as we looked for growth, we ran into some of the same challenges: Making ourselves accessible to a broad population impacted our ability to deliver quality and speed at the volumes that were required.

And so we also are along this journey and needed to find another way. So we have identified that there is another way that boot camp style programming can be made effective in solving this gap. So for organizations that are looking to skill up a workforce for the clean tech sector, pairing that boot camp style with a long tail focus on career success is a winning formula that provides a skill set that's needed to get people into the workforce.

Much like we what we just looked at, it checks a lot of the boxes.

But it also provides the ongoing support to help people apply those skills, put those skills into practice, while they're in that boot camp style programming so that they can make that career transition. Career success is what comes from being able to apply this, or make that transition from being in a boot camp training program and moving them into a profession in the clean tech sector.

So we talked about hiring as a gap. We look at that learning gap or skilling up the workforce. How do we change this?

Our recommendation, our point of view is that we look at boot camp style delivery as a critical path to delivering this and the skills that are needed to power the clean tech sector in the coming, not just a year, but the coming years, and pairing that with career success, long tail support.

This is how we can make that change happen. Now, for employers on the call, for those of you who have communities that you're looking to support, looking for a boot camp style program can be a daunting task for those reasons I mentioned before: what's real and what's not.

The criteria we have up on screen are ones that you could use and are traditionally used to evaluate what boot camp style program is the best for me. And if you take those criteria and you pair them with a scorecard, you can use this as an example of how to evaluate whether this program is better than that or better than another.

But while boot camp style programming is highly effective in solving this problem, I would urge you to change the criteria if you're considering as an employer partnering with an organization like that.

Or if you've got a community that you're looking to upscale, I'd urge you to reconsider your criteria and add in long term support, career success support and work integrated learning as essential, and you will not find them anywhere because we've had to invent that.

And it's a way that organizations can deliver on the promise of upskilling an organization or sorry, a group of people in order to meet the needs of this clean tech workforce.

So to close: All right, Boyd, we're almost at time. We had a question or two come in. We'll leave a moment for that. Where do we start?

So whether you're hiring or looking to build capacity for the community to serve collaboration together, the path forward is to solve the workforce disconnect and propel Canada to worldwide leadership in this sector.

So, on the talent acquisition side, if you're looking for talent, we can help. Uvaro can help. If you're looking to build a reskilling program, we, as in, we Uvaro, can help, but we cannot solve it. We need each other in order for this to work, but we can help and we can be part of bringing that solution to the market to close these gaps and build a workforce that will propel Canada into a future position in the clean tech sector.

We love to collaborate as do our partners and employers. Some of you are here on the call. Hello to those of you who are here!

We would encourage you to speak to each other, to speak to us. We are committed to taking candidates to number one worldwide in the clean tech sector by unblocking the talent challenge we have in front of us today and we just need the, the partnership, the collaboration to put all the pieces together, to bring the federal funding, strategic supports and the skill development together to execute on that challenge.

So if you've made it through to this part of the discussion today, and you're looking for a way to connect with us please do reach out, you can connect with our team, with our partnerships team. You can reach us at that email address that's on the screen [partners@uvaro.com].

We'll include information in the resource pack that we will be sending out. There's a phone number and an email address there. But I also would encourage anyone who reviews this recording or is here live and in part of the conversation today, if you found anything interesting, you want to speak more about it, I'd encourage you also just to reach out to me on LinkedIn.

It's an opportunity to give me some context to who you are and figure out the right way to engage. Before we come to time, Toya, I think there was a question or two that had rolled in and if not, that's ok too, we can move to conclude.

[Toya]

There were two questions I will give them to you in the order that we receive them. One of these is more commentary, but I think that it is definitely valuable for the conversation being had and that is in the graph on barriers being encountered. "I think a key question to ask employers is why, why are they having difficulty? Why is there a lack of interest in the jobs they have posted? Are they competitive enough? Are employers being innovative enough to attract and retain?"

[Greg]

Yes, I think that's a great comment. And it's going back to the why are, you know, why are we having barriers to getting this talent? I think it, I think the point is, is well, is well taken. Thank you for that. Thank you for that.

[Toya]

No problem. The second is an interesting way to think about like internal dialogue that employers need to have. And that is "There's also a bias in terms of the expectation that education and certifications equal a better employee. Is there a way to run an assessment on actual employer needs versus wants? I found employer want to fill a position of someone leaving and expect the same experience or skills but want to pay less."

 [Greg]

I think that, I mean, in our own experience, in our own experiences, if we reflect on how we operate in the workforce, if anyone or the person asking the question, or if anyone listening has been in a position to hire people before it is easier in principle or is easier in concept than in practice to put these pieces together.

The skills-based hiring approach seems counterintuitive to how we have done societally, done hiring, and posting for roles in the past. But it forces you to think about truly, what do I need? And if I were to imagine my ideal candidate, what are the skills that they would possess in order to best serve the business, as opposed to getting stuck in the trap of thinking more about what is the structure that I wanna create? What are the pay bands and restrictions and constraints that I have and working backwards from that.

So starting from a place of, you know, what is it that the organization needs will put you in a better position to take a skills based hiring approach.

[Toya]

I agree wholeheartedly. I also think that the framing of the job postings and asking for those requirements explicitly and figuring out what those are will help to reveal what the true needs are versus the wants. And help with that internal bias that you were speaking to, not sure who this question came from, but thank you so much for raising it. Greg, did you have anything else before we close out?

[Greg]

I just had to say for those of you who have joined us this afternoon. I just want to say thank you for being here. I want to say thank you for the opportunity to share a bit of time, share some thoughts. Again, I welcome your thoughts, feedback.

So please reach out to us with any questions or thoughts that you have, and watch for that resource pack from us. And please do reach out if you'd like to talk more about our approach to solving this workforce gap in the coming year.

[Toya]

Awesome. Thank you all so much. Have a great rest of your afternoon.

[Greg]

Thanks, Toya. And thank you everyone for being here. Thank you everybody.

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