If a plumber showed up to your house with no truck or tools, how could they help? At most, they could only talk about your basement flood.
This is an analogy Farid Ghasem Asad uses often when he talks about teaching students — he’s a college instructor, and CEO of Pixelman Marketing Agency.
“I recommend to all my students: if you want to get a good job, academic education and knowledge is a foundation, but you need the tools,” he said. “Just like a plumber.”
Upskilling and technical training can help workers save time, find better jobs, receive higher salaries, or even just keep up in a rapidly evolving industry, Asad said. He has Masters degrees, a PhD, multiple diplomas, and still spends hours a day learning and taking certificate courses, not only to teach students, but also for his own marketing firm.
“The [search engine] algorithm is changing so quickly — almost every six months — and I have to upgrade my skills with those certificates,” Asad said.
“Most of them are for free, but they’re going to help us understand how to lead our clients, right?”
ADP Research’s People at Work 2025 report found that upskilling correlates to a 37 per cent jump in wages.
An expensive post-grad program may not be necessary — free training and certificates are still valuable, said Andrea Wynter, vice-president of people at ADP Canada, a company that specializes in employer services and human resources.
“More important than the cost [of the program] is seeing a history of continuous skills development over the entirety of an individual’s professional career, and not just in the early stages,” she said.
“This helps convey that you are a lifelong learner, inherently curious, and focused on keeping pace in this fast-changing world of work.”
It’s important to be strategic about your training, Wynter said, and ensure it aligns with your goals.
Research your target role and industry, find out the necessary skills, and reach out to your professional network or industry associations. You can even ask your existing HR team, she added.
This research will also help with finding reputable training programs that will be respected in the industry.
“Additional benefits that come from pursuing additional training and skills development is the opportunity for networking and relationship-building with peers,” Wynter said, “and a sense of increased confidence from the knowledge.”
Many existing employees — not just hopeful job seekers or career climbers — are also eager to upgrade their knowledge, said Suehlan Yu, chief human resources officer at Accenture Canada, a strategy and consulting professional services company.
“Accenture’s research indicates that 94 per cent of employees are ready to acquire new skills to work with generative AI,” she said.
Accenture runs its own company-wide program to train its employees at all levels about complex new technology, and also offers services to clients to help them upskill their own workforces.
In terms of how workers can improve their career prospects, Yu likes to differentiate between learning and “skilling,” saying the latter can set a job candidate apart.
“Learning gives you knowledge, whereas skilling gives you an advantage — and I think sometimes they both are used interchangeably,” she said. “But skilling brings in that competitive edge compared to learning.”
Needing an MBA to get a dream job is no longer the reality, she added.
“Today, there’s so much out there, the whole skill landscape has changed,” Yu said. “The way you learn, what you learn, and how you learn, has changed — again, thanks to technology.”
Some industries are being threatened by artificial intelligence, and Asad sees this in creative fields. Future artists will have to be engineers as well, he said. Or back to the plumber analogy: you will always need the tools.
The gaming industry is a perfect example — you can design a beautiful 3D environment, he explained, but it is not functional until you add a programming language and coding.
“I’m always telling my students: if you want to stay in any field of creativity, multimedia, art — plus technology — don’t be a pure engineer in technology, or a pure artist,” he said.
“We always need something in the middle, which is the ‘engineer of art.’”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 15, 2025.
Nina Dragicevic, The Canadian Press
