Identified needs rubenson and walker 2006 call this

identified needs. Rubenson and Walker (2006) call this the second
generation of lifelong learning, shifting lifelong learning toward
human resource development in response to the corporate agenda.
In the globalization era, Canada has been positioning itself as a
knowledge and high tech economy where all levels of education
can be used to create a superior workforce with a global competi-
tive edge (in common with policies pursued in many other western
and developing countries). The Conference Board of Canada and
the Business Council on National Issues suggested that the educa-
tion sector was underperforming and they developed an Employ-
ability Skills Profile (1998, 2000) that stipulated the labour skills
needed for the New Economy. They identified that the Canadian
workforce required: the fundamental skills of being able to commu-
nicate, think, and solve problems, manage information and continue
to learn lifelong; the personal management skills of demonstrating
positive attitudes toward change as well as responsibility, adaptabil-
ity, and flexibility; and teamwork skills such as being able to work
with others for high performance in multi-task teams.
One example of the impact of neo-liberalism on education is
Alberta, the first province to adopt neo-liberalism in the early 1990s.
The Klein government attacked the notion of equality of opportu-
nity, replacing it with the “new logic of competition, effectiveness,
standards, choice, vocational ism and marketization” (see Harrison ft
Kachur, 1999, p. xiii). The explicit goal of the Klein provincial gov-
ernment was to reduce the size of the welfare state. To do this, they

180
The Purposes of Adult Education
withdrew significant funding from various sectors and then replaced
it with either specific funding envelopes or they pared off specific
services to the private sector. Statistics indicate that private sec-
tor involvement in education increased anywhere from 15 to 35%
through business-education partnerships, business input into poli-
cies and curriculum, advertising space in educational institutions, as
well as targeted business funding for services and infrastructure in
schools and post-secondary institutions, often through P3s (private-
public partnerships).
Since then, reinvestment has occurred in education but, as indi-
cated above, in targeted ways through envelopes that tie funding to
performance indicators, shaped by government priorities. In post-
secondary education, funding was increased to the applied sciences,
information technologies, and commercial-potential research and
decreased to other disciplines. The Alberta government department
responsible for higher education was later renamed as the Ministry
of Enterprise and Advanced Education and in 2013 cuts of more
than 7% have been implemented across post-secondary institutions.