About us

Strategic Plan

FSC Priority #1: Easy to access practical labor market and skills information.  

FUSION’s first round has focused on providing our most important stakeholder, students, with access to flexible and effective tools to a) learn about the skills that are increasingly essential to future success, b) more rapidly develop these skills, and c) articulate how their FUSION experience has prepared them for success. Our next round of project activities will broaden this impact by expanding the library of FUSION skill resources, by tripling the number of students who have access to FUSION resources, and by continually innovating new strategies to deepen the effectiveness of our work. Our commitment to expand the availability of FUSION resources to the broader Canadian higher education ecosystem is an ideal way to expand access in phase 2.

FSC Priority #2: Responsive Career Pathways.

The university is not the only viable pathway to a career, but we posit that higher education has an essential role in skills training and developing flexible career pathways, positioning our students for success upon graduation and into the future as the dynamic labour market continues to evolve. While universities have traditionally excelled at delivering high quality curricular content, FUSION expands on this work by integrating skill instruction in the active learning experiences that our participants engage in in their university experience. FUSION has been a catalyst for shifting the conversation of skills development as a core function of our institutions. As we proceed, we are positioned to further integrate skill development with curricular advancement.

FSC Priority #3: Agile labour market responses.

To date, FUSION has successfully delivered on our initial theory of change—when we collaborate across Canadian university contexts, we can innovate better, scale-up faster, and rapidly learn from the work happening across the network. In the expansion phase of FUSION, we build on this promise by actively working with industry, non-profits, government, and other sectors of the labour market to help produce outcomes explicitly linked to the needs of the employment sector.

FSC Priority #4: “What Works” replication.

Continuing its partnership with FUSION affords the FSC the opportunity to scale up a prototype innovation with well-documented empirical evidence of effectiveness. We have triangulated the effectiveness of our interventions, highlighted by the FUSION curriculum implementation, through a culture of data-gathering and evaluation. This includes pre- and post-assessments of student skills, student interviews, and analysis of student learning artifacts. Across our six institutions, we have gathered quantitative and qualitative data that all point to the same conclusion: participants are more skilled and confident because of their FUSION experience. We also have experienced that our networked approach to radical sharing and innovative implementation works to more rapidly affect the kinds of culture changes that ensure an enduring legacy on how our universities prepare students for the future.

The expansion of the FUSION initiative includes several additions to the initial project aimed at situating our work in the context of systemic challenges in the Canada ecosystem. Our proposed pan-Canadian FUSION industry roundtable will more directly link the innovation of the network with the specific needs of the employers most likely to engage our graduates. Our proposed work around assessment innovation and work to create an industry-recognized microcredential framework each address one of our key identified gaps—making student skill development in the university context transparent in ways our traditional transcripts have not. The pan-Canadian nature of our institutional partners helps us prepare our students for success wherever they work—something we recognize as increasingly valuable as Canada’s workforce becomes increasingly mobile compared to generations past.