Rapid response in times of disruption
Many industries have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, but perhaps none more so than the hospitality and tourism sector.
As part of the Future Skills Centre (FSC) consortium, Blueprint is contributing to the Rapid Response in Times of Disruption project designed to help workers and employers in this hard-hit industry. Blueprint’s team is leading efforts to generate evidence and develop insights that will inform rapid-response interventions for tourism and hospitality workers whose jobs have been affected by the pandemic.
The FSC consortium is partnering with the Ontario Tourism Education Corporation (OTEC) — Ontario’s leader in workforce innovation for the tourism and hospitality industry — and an alliance of stakeholders including the Tourism Industry Association of Ontario, the Ontario Restaurant Hotel and Motel Association, the Hospitality Workers Training Centre, Tourism HR Canada and Tourism SkillsNet Ontario.
Together, project partners are working to connect with displaced workers, map their skills and training needs, and launch prototypes of new training and job-matching services. OTEC and its partners will draw on their industry experience to engage displaced workers, businesses and service-delivery organizations to participate in the research. FSC and its consortium partners — Blueprint, Toronto Metropolitan University’s Magnet and the Conference Board of Canada — will provide additional expertise.
Blueprint is designing data collection tools to learn about the skills and backgrounds of displaced workers, the challenges they face and their preference for training opportunities. We will use our innovative human-centred design approach to uncover the needs of displaced workers and employers to inform the design of a service-delivery platform and recovery-planning processes. Once initiatives are up and running, a rapid-cycle evaluation strategy will allow us to use up-to-date evidence to guide the continuous improvement of project prototypes.
Learn more about how we are using data and evidence to support this project here.
Our team and partners live and work on the traditional territory of many Indigenous people across Turtle Island. Blueprint’s home office is situated in the area known as Tkaronto, an area that has been caretaken by the Anishinabek Nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, and the Huron-Wendat for thousands of years. We strive to meaningfully incorporate principles of reconciliation with First Nations, Inuit, and Métis peoples in our day-to-day work, as is our collective responsibility as treaty people, which requires ongoing reflection and collective action.
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