Skills for Productivity, Prosperity and Well-Being in Canada

In this report, published by the Future Skills Centre, we provide an overview of the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessments of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) survey and data, including its limitations, to orient users to its potential and weaknesses. We present the results of a systematic review of Canadian-focused studies that use PIAAC, highlighting key findings as well as gaps and unanswered questions. Drawing on insights from the literature review, interviews, and gap analysis, we then present a Canadian PIAAC Research Agenda including topics and enabling conditions for using the data, conducting research, and sharing results.

Why do we need a PIAAC Research Agenda?

Canada is in the midst of a productivity and growth challenge. Part of the issue is skills. While Canada has one of the most highly educated populations in the world, the distribution and use of skills across the adult population is uneven. This is evident in results from the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessments of Adult Competencies (PIAAC) – an international survey of hundreds of thousands of adults, including nearly 40,000 in Canada, over two cycles of data collection. New PIAAC data released at the end of 2024 provides Canada with an opportunity to improve understanding of relationships among skills, productivity, prosperity and well-being, and to use that knowledge to design better policies and programs.

Researchers using PIAAC data have generated useful insights that have informed skills policies and programs across Canada. However, attention to PIAAC has fluctuated over the years. Many appear interested only in PIAAC as a once-a-decade snapshot of Canada’s relative global standing on skills. Not seeing any glaring problems with Canada’s ranking, attention predictably wanes. This is unfortunate as PIAAC has substantial, longer-term value: By using PIAAC data to better understand who has skills, how they are used, and how they change over time, researchers can help us identify strengths, gaps and areas for improvements in skills policies and programs.

Read the accompanying blogs:

1. What is PIAAC and Why Does It Matter? December 9, 2024

2. What's Past is Prologue: What we learned about adult skills in Canada from the first cycle of PIAAC, and what we still need to explore. February 27, 2025

3. A Worrying Skills Landscape: First Impression of Canadian Skills Performance from PIAAC Cycle 2 July 29, 2025

4. Mind the Gap: How changes in PIAAC data collection limit what we can learn about skills, and what we can do to fix the gap in the future August 29, 2025

5. Towards a Canadian PIAAC Research Agenda September 3, 2025