RESCON calls for behavioural research to reform apprenticeship system
By Don Wall
for Daily Commercial News
Sept. 10, 2026
As Ontario students return to classes for the fall semester, RESCON president Richard Lyall is calling for significant reforms to the recruitment of apprentices including more opportunities for streaming high school students into the trades and greater adoption of behavioural science to identify young people with an aptitude for the trades.
Lyall highlighted findings from a recent report commissioned by RESCON (the Residential Construction Council of Ontario) titled Are We Ready to Build Canada? A Behavioural Analysis of Canada’s Construction Talent Pipeline and Skills Training Policy.
“The training challenges for the construction skilled trades are behavioural as well as economic,” stated the report. “They are shaped by the uncertainty, time pressures, self-doubt and inertia that many people face, and by the system’s misaligned incentives and lack of support at key junctures in the skills journey.”
Today’s young people obtain information and learn differently than past generations, Lyall said in a recent interview, urging modernization of the apprenticeship system.
“We need to know who are these young people, what are their aptitudes? What are they suited for?” he said. “You might identify a kid as a completely visual learner, tactile, that you know would be ideal for the skill trades.”
Recruitment should start in elementary school, said Lyall.
“That’s the first area that really needs to be addressed, where they’re getting a fulsome exposure to what potential careers are out there,” he said.
“You need to have right throughout the school system is an organized introduction to skilled trades, where they actually get out and see workplaces that they might otherwise never see, and they get introduced to some of these things.”
The authors argued using a behavioural lens would provide new insights into barriers to recruitment, challenges within training and issues affecting retention. They wrote policy and program design must better reflect the human factors influencing training outcomes in the years ahead.
“Canada needs to overhaul its system from one that merely provides opportunities to one that actively facilitates meaningful usage and completion. The missing ingredient is an understanding of why people behave as they do,” stated the report.
Lyall offered five priority actions in his forward to the report:
Better data on completions and systemic costs is needed to measure success.
Measuring the right things such as completions rather than registrations is crucial.
Focus on who the programs serve – trainees and employers – and take into account their attitudes and needs.
The response to systemic deficiencies must be “urgent and nimble” to address the “low-hanging fruit” of simple changes that can be made quickly.
Emphasize better design and implementation – program reforms are only as good as how well they reflect human behaviour.
The authors found apprenticeship completion rates in Canada have remained stuck at around 20 per cent of registrations over the last decade despite the demand for workers. The stagnation results in billions of dollars in lost GDP, worker incomes and tax revenues.
The need for new approaches is essential, Lyall said, given that the federal government has identified a suite of major projects that will be unrolled, all requiring a pipeline of skilled trades. Meanwhile the demand for more homes remains a national imperative, he said.
“You can have all the finance people in the world,” he said. “You can have all the planners. You can have all the designers.
“But at the end of the day, where the rubber hits the road, the electricians, the crane operators, the drywallers, they’re the people that are making it happen on a site.”
The report suggests how behavioural psychology can identify the choices an apprentice is facing that might influence a decision to stop their training before completing their program.
“This completion problem in Canada’s voluntary trades is, to a large degree, a deficiency in design that may be addressed by a combination of simple changes and more challenging initiatives,” states the report.
The authors highlight several success stories in Ontario involving school-age youths that can serve as templates for reforms.
Ontario’s Level Up! career fairs bring Grade 7 to 12 students into direct contact with tradespeople and employers through hands-on demonstrations in communities across the province, reaching over 35,000 students in 2024 alone.
Programs like STEP to Construction offer Grade 11 and 12 students a semester-long co-op placement on an actual jobsite, rotating through multiple trades.
The annual Skills Ontario Competition and Career Exploration Showcase also reaches thousands of potential trades workers.