With the New Year upon us, we’d like to take a moment to recap all of the milestones we achieved this year.

2022 has been a busy and productive year for the Provincial Employment Roundtable (PERT). Over the last year, our team released more than 20 reports highlighting the employability challenges faced by Québec’s English-speaking communities and touching on the following themes:

• Employment Profiles of English Speakers in Québec
• French-Second-Language Learning
• English-Language Vocational and Technical Training in Québec
• 2021 Employment Survey of English-Speaking Québecers & Organizations   

This work has contributed to undoing long-held assumptions and provided a clearer picture of the economic realities facing English speakers in Québec. Beyond defining the problems, our reports also focus on opportunities and solutions. The recommendations in these reports are some first steps in the process of developing policies to better integrate the English-speaking community in Québec’s labour market.

Over the last year, we have also been successful in expanding our outreach capacity and strengthening our partnerships across the province. This summer, we had the pleasure of travelling to the Magdalen Islands and meeting the team at CAMI. This experience reinforced our plans to create a Regional Sectoral Table, in order to better address the unique employment challenges regional English speakers face. Along with the creation of the Regional Sectoral Table, we also created our Education Sectoral Table and increased our consultation capacity by adding new members to our Employer Sectoral table. Going into 2023, we look forward to continuing to grow these tables and developing their capacity to influence our research agenda. 

Our team has also grown this year. We are pleased to have welcomed four new staff members, allowing us to increase our research and outreach capabilities. We also had the pleasure of welcoming two new members to our Board of Directors: Lina Aristeo and Malcolm Lewis-Richmond. We look forward to learning from their insights and expertise. 

As per PERT tradition, we closed off the year with the 3rd edition of our annual conference. This year’s conference theme was “Putting Language to Work”. It was a great opportunity to bring stakeholders together to discuss the intersection of language and work for English-speaking Québecers and examine how Québec can better harness the skills and experience of its English speakers.

While we have taken the time to reflect on our accomplishments over the past year, the end of the year is also a time to look forward. We are excited about the opportunities in 2023 to continue to grow our network and establish new partnerships. We also plan to build upon our research findings and further deepen our understanding of the challenges and solutions needed to move our community forward with a new batch of reports set to be published in 2023, which include:

• Best practices in language learning in Québec
• International Approaches to Language Learning
• Our 2022 Employment Profiles of English-Speaking Québecers 

Upcoming events also include:

• January 31st: PERT’s 2021 Census data update
• February 28th: PERT Forum on Employment of Québec’s marginalized English-speaking communities. The event will focus on the employment situation and employment support services available to marginalized members of Québec’s English-speaking community
• May 31st – June 1st: An employability conference in collaboration with RDN and The Consortium of English-language CEGEPs, Colleges and Universities of Québec, which  will provide updates on the current state of employment in Québec 

On behalf of the entire team, we wish you and your loved ones a happy and safe holiday season. We hope each and every one of you has the chance to spend time with those you care about and enjoy some well-deserved rest.

See you in 2023!