Hardik Patel sighs when he thinks back to the winter of 2018.

That spring, the young doctor had arrived in Toronto from Mumbai, full of hope and eager to find work.

After knocking on doors, making phone calls and sending his resumé to dozens of companies in the medical field, he was beginning to get discouraged. His money — enough, he’d figured, to last a year — was beginning to run out.

“I started to give up. People kept saying, ‘You need Canadian experience.’ Companies want a local candidate. I understand that. Sometimes I didn’t even hear anything back at all. Not even a ‘no.’ So for about a month, I was so discouraged that I didn’t even apply to anything,” said Patel, 31.

While he hadn’t expected to walk right into a top job, it was still a rude awakening for a man who had worked as a medical adviser for Bristol-Myers Squibb, a U.S.-based pharmaceutical giant, and had spent nine months at a hospital seeing up to 150 patients a day. “I knew I could do that work here. And I knew Canada needs doctors.”

Eventually, he found work with a medical startup, after completing a part-time course at the University of Toronto on the Canadian health-care system, as well as some seminars with ACCES Employment, an employment agency for new Canadians.

Today, he’s come full circle, working as a medical adviser for the Canadian operations of a pharmaceutical company. He knows he’s one of the lucky ones. Just 24 per cent of the 300,000 or so immigrants Canada welcomes each year find work in their field, according to Statistics Canada.

“I know some people who have just decided to go back home to India, and I understand why,” Patel said.

The saddest part of his story is that Toronto desperately needs to hang on to skilled workers like Patel.

The city is growing at a breakneck pace and already there are too few people to fill jobs in information technology, the skilled trades and health care. Experts warn that without government, industry and schools working together, those skills gaps could grow even bigger over the next decade, exacerbated by retiring baby boomers, Toronto’s high cost of living and lingering bias against blue-collar work.

In 2019, there were 5.6 million people living in Toronto’s census metropolitan area (CMA), with 3.5 million people working, according to Statistics Canada. By 2031, according to a projection from the Ontario Ministry of Labour, there will be roughly 7.4 million people living in the Toronto CMA, with 3.7 million people working.

Within five years, 20,000 nurses and 8,000 family doctors will be needed in Ontario, according to the province. In the construction world, more than 90,000 people will be retiring from the skilled trades in this city over the next decade, according to the Toronto Construction Association.

We are at a turning point as the city seeks to make sure the growth is sustainable, Jan De Silva, president and CEO of the Toronto Region Board of Trade, told the Star. “It’s up to this generation to make sure that this isn’t just a moment, it’s momentum.”

The construction industry handily illustrates how rapidly Toronto’s workforce is evolving.

The next 10 years will be filled with change, some of it driven by advancing technology, some simply by how densely packed the city will have become, said John Mollenhauer, president and CEO of the Toronto Construction Association. Change is not something the construction world has dealt with particularly gracefully, Mollenhauer admitted. Now, it will have no choice.

“The industry has remained relatively unchanged for over 100 years. But we are entering a new era. Everything will change, and quickly,” Mollenhauer said. One example? Simply managing a building site.

“By default, it’s becoming just-in-time delivery. Density is so high that you can’t just store all your materials for the whole project on-site,” Mollenhauer said. That means more need for people with logistical planning skills.

New technology is creating the need for new, tech-focused jobs. As one example, Mollenhauer pointed to what is now a cumbersome, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous process — overseeing the welding on highrise buildings.

“If you’re building a tower 70 storeys in the air, it’s hard to get people up there to watch the welding process and oversee it. But soon, there will be drone operators. That drone could not only get up there and inspect it in real time, but it could X-ray to gauge whether the weld was done correctly, and sign off on the approval,” Mollenhauer said.

And it turns out virtual reality isn’t just for gaming. Rather than just looking at a two-dimensional blueprint on a table, everyone from architects and project managers will be able to take a virtual tour of a building before it’s built.

There’s another big change coming in the construction industry — a generational one. Over the next decade, tens of thousands of people in the skilled trades in the GTA will retire, Mollenhauer said. That means plenty of room for new electricians, plumbers, stonemasons and other skilled tradespeople. These are workers who are already in high demand as it is, said Mollenhauer, who admits to being baffled by the lack of interest in the trades.

Retail is another area where nothing is standing still. And yet again, new technology is largely the driver.

“As the shift to online retail continues, there will be more of a demand for all sorts of technological skills, especially digital marketing. IT people, designers, database managers, marketing people — those will all be vital positions,” according to Karl Littler, vice-president of the Retail Council of Canada.

All those online sales will need to be sorted at warehouses before being shipped to your door. So even if there may be fewer bricks-and-mortar stores with fewer sales staff, other jobs are being created.

“There will be more people needed at distribution centres and in delivery, and fewer people stocking shelves at stores,” Littler said.

Even in bricks-and-mortar stores, the nature of work will continue to evolve over the next decade, Littler argues. The days of just pointing a customer to the snowblower or T-shirt aisle are swiftly coming to an end. Building a relationship with that customer, whether it’s having a database of all their previous purchases or bringing them in to see a personal shopper who understands their likes and dislikes, is the wave of the future.

Given the shift away from manufacturing and towards technology jobs — plus the city’s rapid expansion — how will Toronto find the workers it needs? Clues can be found by looking at other areas that have experienced a dramatic shift.

North Carolina, for instance.

Back in the late 1990s, the state’s once-thriving tobacco industry was in free fall, as smoking fell out of favour. Farmhands, managers and people who worked in tobacco processing lost their jobs by the thousands. Among the final blows was a series of successful lawsuits against cigarette manufacturers.

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At the same time, the state’s burgeoning biotech industry — driven by the so-called Research Triangle, home to Duke University, North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina — was also having a major problem: dozens of new startups couldn’t find enough workers.

“They were really struggling to find people with the skills they needed,” said Sarah Doyle, director of policy and research at Ryerson University’s Brookfield Institute for Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

High-tech employers looking for workers, laid-off workers looking for jobs. Once, it would have been an unbridgeable gap. But in North Carolina’s case, colleges, companies and governments came up with a six-week intensive course designed to give those tobacco workers the basic skills to work in the biotech startups.

It worked.

“It worked because it was all the stakeholders. Workers said what they needed. Employers said what kind of skills they needed people to have. Colleges helped design the courses, and governments asked, ‘What can we do to help?’” said Doyle, who is leading a Brookfield Institute study on the nature of work in Canada in 2030. (A report based on Brookfield’s yearlong study will be released in mid-March.)

Making sure people coming into the workforce have the right skills and training to fill the available jobs is crucial. The skills gap is a matter for governments, companies and schools to solve together, agreed Sunil Johal, director of business growth services for the city of Toronto.

Universities and colleges can’t just focus on their own programs in isolation.

“There’s a significant role for post-secondary institutions. They’re graduating teachers or lawyers, and there might not be jobs for them to move into. That’s a challenge,” Johal said.

The idea, however, of going to school for six weeks — or even four years — and having all the skills and education you need for the rest of your career is fading into history, said Jonathan Lister, LinkedIn’s manager for Canada. If there is one theme that will continue to gain momentum in Toronto’s job market — and elsewhere — over the next decade, Lister said, it is change, whether in the world of IT, retail, health care or construction.

“Agility is going to be really important. The key for employees is to get good at learning,” Lister said. “The idea of lifelong learning is becoming a prerequisite.”

Sometimes, that will mean taking the odd night course. Sometimes, it will mean learning and growing on the job, Lister predicts.

“Having on-the-job learning will be a competitive advantage for employers when it comes to attracting talent,” Lister said.

If training and education is one way to close the skills gaps, immigration is another, argues the Board of Trade’s De Silva. As Hardik Patel discovered when he arrived from Mumbai, many of the doctors, engineers and IT professionals we need are already in this city, driving taxis, delivering food or working other jobs that don’t use their full array of skills.

“It is such a waste of talent,” DeSilva said. “We need more immigration and … we need to make sure those skills are being applied.”

Part of the problem is that when immigrants arrive in Canada, there’s a reluctance — and sometimes outright refusal — to recognize their professional credentials and experience. Going back to school to get that degree from scratch is out of reach for many, in terms of both time and money.

De Silva’s solution? A six-month set of refresher courses, followed by a co-op placement.

“You can’t ask people to do a four-year degree,” De Silva said.

For Patel, that makes complete sense — both for newcomers arriving here, and for companies looking to hire.

“I understand they want to make sure someone can do the job. So, allow people to do a one-year internship to prove that they can. Give them minimum wage. They get Canadian experience, the company gets a spot filled,” said Patel, who has settled into life here.

He’s grateful for the opportunity to use the skills and knowledge he acquired in India.

“Now, Canada feels like home. I hope other people get the chance, too.”

One Toronto. Two possible futures. Ten years to get it right. Toronto has never been bigger, bolder and more successful – or faced so many serious problems. To attract talent and grow sustainably, we need to address the city’s transportation, affordability and infrastructure needs. If we ignore these threats, the inner city buckles. It’s time to start thinking about solutions.

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