Help wanted.

People tell me I'm too optimistic. Maybe thats true. But I've grown to be very suspicious of the motives of people behind that criticism. In my experience, what gets called optimism is usually just someone refusing to stop at simply naming a problem. Anyone can point at what's broken but it takes considerably more effort and honesty to sit with it long enough to find a way through what’s not working. We definitely don't have a shortage of people more than willing to cast blame or righteously point out the problems. Once they're done, all that's really been accomplished is a lot of noise, and we still haven't landed anywhere better. A lot of pessimists just want to be right I suppose. They want the "I told you so" more than they want the solution. That's not useful.

Which leads me to Canada's February jobs numbers. They were rough and nobody could deny that. 84,000 jobs lost. What that likely means in practice is that experienced professionals, people with skills, track records, and decades of hard-won knowledge, are sitting on the sidelines. Meanwhile entire sectors are screaming for operational talent saying they can’t find it. The headlines of those pessimists speaking about this are calling it a white-collar crisis. I'd call it a misalignment. And misalignments can be fixed, if the right people decide to fix them. I wrote a book about reinvention and how to do it because I've had to live it. There's no doubt in my mind that this moment calls for those reinvention principles, applied broadly and urgently. Three groups can move this and help solve the issue instead of bemoaning it.

Employers: Stop waiting for the perfect hire aligned to past job titles in specific sectors.

The talent you need is available right now. My guess is that you're filtering it out because a resume you get doesn't match your posting line for line. A displaced operations director from a contracting industry knows how to build systems, lead people, and solve problems under pressure. A communications professional from a shrinking sector can translate your complexity into clarity that your customers actually understand. These aren't consolation prize hires. These are people who can walk in and make your organization better within 90 days. The military's been navigating this issue for decades. Highly trained veterans enter the civilian workforce carrying with them exceptional skills and they get passed over because their experience doesn't map cleanly onto your job description. A job description that was written for a completely different world. That's not a talent shortage. That's a failure of imagination. Hire for transferable depth. The companies that do this now will look very smart in three years. The ones still chasing the perfect credential match will still be searching, likely importing talent while our Canadian expertise sits idle.

Governments: Stop deliberating. Build something.

The EI system was designed for a completely different labour market, one where people lost a job and then returned to the same kind of job. That's not what's happening now. What's happening now is structural. Whole categories of work are contracting while others are expanding, and the people caught between them need more than income support from the government. They need bridges. Portable credentials and short-form reskilling tied to real employer demand. Programs that treat experienced workers as assets to be redirected, not casualties to be managed. You've been talking about modernizing labour market supports for years. The data's now making the argument louder than any policy paper ever could. Pick something. Fund it. Build it. Move!

Workers: Our job title isn't our skill set.

These two things got bundled together over the course of our careers and so it’s become easy to forget they're separate things. Our skill set is what travels with us, not the title we held at our last job, but what we’re actually good at. My generation built our careers in a more linear world. We like to say we understand the flexibility younger workers want. But we can't fully mean it (or we’re deluding ourselves) because we still build organizations and career paths around loyalty and tenure. And then we act surprised when people who grew up with the internet, a pandemic, and three economic upheavals (all before the age of 30) decided they weren't waiting for our permission to reinvent themselves. They don't want a corporate ladder. They want us to stop pretending it's the only way up. What displaced workers need at every stage of their career is support in finding where their real skills intersect with where demand is actually moving. That intersection isn't always obvious. It requires honest self-assessment, real information, and the courage to step toward something unfamiliar. That's not a personality trait. It's a learnable process. Everyone can do it. Thats what reinvention is.

Canada isn't short on talent. It's short on the imagination to see where that talent fits next. That's a solvable problem, but only if employers stop over-filtering, governments stop deliberating, and workers of every generation give themselves permission to move toward what's next instead of waiting for what was.

Pessimism is easy. Solutions are work. I know which one I'd rather be doing.

❤️🇨🇦