Magnet’s Empowering 2027: A visionary roadmap 10 years in the making

By Emily Madden

Senior Director, Magnet

Over the last 18 months, Magnet has engaged with stakeholders, experts, and partners to solidify our goals and strategies for the next three years. The result is Empowering 2027, Magnet’s multi-year strategic plan and visionary roadmap for the future. This document is something in which we have great confidence as a future-focused plan, but also as an elegant and clear statement of our commitment to empowering Canada’s labour market ecosystem. 

Achieving this clarity, however, was a complex and nuanced process. Formally, Magnet engaged in 14 external stakeholder consultations, ten internal strategic planning sessions, six planning sessions with technology partners, and more than 40 direct community engagement events across Canada.

We also gathered perspectives from our 15-member Advisory Board, which features experts representing post-secondary education, research, industry, technology, government, non-profit, think tanks, and talent development. 

This is to say nothing of the ten years we’ve spent leading projects with our partners across Canada and learning together how we can bring more innovation and efficiency to the labour market ecosystem.

That complexity and lengthy process of engagement, while challenging at times and marked by constant pivoting, is precisely why we’re so proud of Empowering 2027. This document is informed by the insights of experts and the organizations that comprise Canada’s labour market ecosystem. That means the goals and strategies we’ve outlined here are aligned with those of the ecosystem and will put us on the path to realizing common goals that benefit all stakeholders and the communities they serve.

Empowering 2027 is the result of a ten year trust exercise

From the beginning, Magnet attempted to do something that hadn’t been done before in Canada by reducing fragmentation and increasing collaboration across a highly complex ecosystem of thousands of organizations delivering programs meant to foster economic growth. 

When you’re stepping into unknown territory and creating something novel, you don’t always have total clarity on where you need to go. There were factors we could pay attention to and have a sense of where the puck might go–things like policy agendas, regional trends, and dialogue among stakeholders–but we still had to navigate constantly shifting tides and evolving challenges.

Ultimately, we had to engage in a trust exercise with two fundamental building blocks: ongoing dialogue with partners and helping lead projects on the ground. The latter has been especially crucial because when venturing into the unknown, it’s hard to explain a vision and create buy-in without building it first and making sure that each step is carefully thought out.

In all our conversations, Magnet maintained a willingness to be challenged as we engaged with partners, leaders across the ecosystem, and our advisory board. Through research and close collaboration with leading technology partners and policymakers working through the same challenges, we had a great deal of confidence that each step we took was the right one. 

The past ten years haven’t just been a matter of listening but taking action. Magnet’s technology has powered over 100 workforce and economic development projects across Canada. These projects were led by partners who not only deployed Magnet’s technology, but worked with us to leverage their public funding to direct the development of what we’ve come to call Magnet’s digital infrastructure, which includes:

• Learning and assessment tools to enable employers to upskill their workforce and reskill new talent
• Knowledge mobilization tools that foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the labour market ecosystem
• Productivity and engagement tools to drive connections between job seekers and employers
• Reporting, adjudication, and job matching tools that empower partners to deliver large-scale grant programs with greater efficiency and effectiveness

These tools are based on a deep understanding of the needs of the ecosystem and an understanding of the challenges and opportunities in the space. Because of that close collaboration and ongoing dialogue that informed these tools, Magnet’s digital infrastructure is now a public good in the truest sense–built by Canada’s publicly funded labour market ecosystem and ready to be deployed to serve Canadians of all backgrounds. 

Empowering 2027 lays the groundwork for expanding our network so that this infrastructure can boost economic productivity, provide regional labour market solutions, and enable more innovation in helping Canadians prepare for the future of work. 

Curiosity, creativity, and collaboration remain Magnet’s north stars 

The conversations we’ve had and the projects we’ve led have now neatly coalesced into the goals and strategies we’ve outlined in Empowering 2027. 

While Magnet was always aware that our goals were ambitious and required addressing complex challenges, we always maintained a spirit of curiosity, creativity, collaboration, and a focus on systems-level social innovation. With that spirit as our compass, we could always be confident that the results would make sense and work to the benefit of our partners and Canadians. 

Each conversation and project was a building block for a system that offers Canada a unique value proposition–a suite of ever-evolving, proprietary solutions and innovative tools that will ensure Canada’s labour market remains innovative and continuously evolving to meet the demands of the future of work.

That’s why we’re excited to make this work public officially through Empowering 2027 and continue working with our valued partners to make an even greater impact.