Skills Investment Critical to Ontario’s Success
Ontario cannot build more housing, certify more tradespeople, integrate newcomers more quickly, or adapt to automation without investing in foundational adult skills.
Get SET — Skills, Education and Training — is Ontario’s adult literacy and skills upgrading program. Each year, it supports almost 50,000 adults building the reading, writing, numeracy, digital, and workplace skills they need to move forward.
Get SET learners include:
- Newcomers with credentials and experience who need Canadian workplace language.
- Apprentices who are ready to work but need support to pass certification exams.
- Workers reskilling after a layoff.
- Adults who left school early and are ready to try again.
The Learning Networks of Ontario has published the Get SET Program Investment Impact Dashboard, a free tool that lets anyone explore how different funding levels affect learners, workers, employers, and public investment.
The return-on-investment case is grounded in practical, conservative assumptions. For example, a three-month reduction in the duration of receiving Ontario Works supports saves approximately $3,000 per participant. A five-point improvement in apprenticeship certification generates approximately $6,000 in Year 1 tax contributions.
On that basis, every dollar invested in Get SET returns between $2.50 and $4.50 in public value.
Those figures deliberately exclude multi-year earnings growth, reduced recidivism, employer productivity gains, and intergenerational education effects. Factor those in, and the return reaches 5:1 or higher.
Broader economic modelling using OECD literacy data suggests that even a 1% improvement in adult literacy could be associated with tens of billions of dollars in additional annual GDP for Ontario. Get SET is one of the most direct available levers for moving that number.
The dashboard’s scenario explorer makes the opportunity concrete:
- $136 million restores Get SET’s 2017–18 purchasing power and would serve more than 50,000 learners.
- $170 million would serve approximately 66,000 learners.
- $200 million would allow the system to reach full capacity: approximately 78,000 Ontarians a year, with a broader annual economic return of $1.4 billion.
That is 32,000 more learners than today: more workers, taxpayers, apprentices, parents, newcomers, and neighbours, all with greater opportunities.
This is not a distant projection. The provider networks exist. The provincial and regional infrastructure exists. The demand, which has risen by more than 25% over the past two years, clearly exists. What scales with investment is reach.
The dashboard is built for anyone trying to understand where adult education and skills upgrading fit into Ontario’s economic picture: elected officials, community partners, employers, researchers, and advocates. The tool is open, interactive, and sourced.
Explore the dashboard. Test the scenarios. Share it with the people making decisions about workforce development, adult learning, and Ontario’s economic future.
To learn more contact a Learning Networks of Ontario representative in your area.
