The Canadian labour market is rapidly evolving. Automation and advances in generative artificial intelligence, for example, require soon-to-be graduates to not only develop the technical skills in their field, but to also develop the foundational skills - such as adaptability, curiosity, communication, teamwork, and resilience - needed to succeed in an unpredictable labour market.

Unfortunately, according to the 2018 Royal Bank of Canada Report Humans Wanted: How Canadian youth can thrive in an age of disruption, “Canada’s education system, training programs and labour market initiatives are inadequately designed to help Canadian youth navigate this new skills economy”. Understanding the changing foundational skill set required by employers is necessary to ensure that tertiary education meets demand and sets students up to succeed in the new skills economy.

This study uses Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) to analyze 75,519 cooperative education job postings advertised to undergraduate students in engineering and information technology (IT) programs between August 2012 and June 2023 at a medium-sized university in Ontario, Canada. We explore the most referenced foundational skills (as reflected by higher TF-IDF scores) in the corpus of job advertisements to enhance our understanding of what non-technical skills employers are looking for in soon-to-be graduates, and if these results change over time.

Results indicate that job postings targeted to undergraduate engineering students prioritize problem solving and teamwork, while those targeted to undergraduate students in IT programs emphasize adaptability and communication. Further, the distribution of unique foundational skills listed in co-operative education job postings advertised to undergraduate students in IT programs is shifted right compared to the distribution for engineering programs. That is, IT job postings typically include more foundational skills than job postings advertised to engineering students. There has also been an overall shift over time (regardless of program type) with more recent job postings including a greater number of unique foundational skills.

These findings could be used to guide educators in adapting curricula to better prepare students for a dynamic job market.

Keywords: Foundational Skills, Co-operative Education, Technology Sector, TF-IDF, Engineering, Information Technology.