Canadian Labour Market
and Skills Researcher
Network
Working Paper No. 3
CLSRN is supported by Human Resources and Social Development Canada (HRSDC)
and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).
All opinions are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of HRSDC or the
SSHRC.
Employee Training in Canada
Nicole Fortin
University of British Columbia
Daniel Parent
McGill University
December 2008
Employee Training In Canada*
* The authors wish to thank an anonymous referee as well as participants at the CLSRN Workshop on
Education and Training held at Queen’s University in September 2007 for comments and suggestions. We
are grateful to the CLSRN for financial support.
Nicole Fortin
Daniel Parent
University of British Columbia
McGill University
December 2008
Abstract
In this paper we first analyze the determinants of training using data from the 2003 Inter-
national Adult Literacy and Skills Survey (IALSS). We find that education plays a key
role in the receipt of all forms of training except in the case of employer-sponsored
training. We also find substantial differences across demographic groups in the
relationship between literacy skills and training. In the second part of the paper we merge
the 1994 IALS to the 2003 IALSS and perform an analysis of the impact of the Quebec
policy introduced in 1995 by which employers are required to devote at least 1% of the
payroll to training activities. In the case of males we find no effect of the policy on the
incidence of employer-sponsored training. On the other hand, Quebec females did
experience a very large relative increase in training incidence between 1994 and 2003.
However, the magnitude of the estimates is much too large to be plausibly caused by the
policy given its modest scale. We show evidence of a significa