Strengthening Canada’s Skills with PIAAC Research: Historical 2025-2026 Call

Strengthening Canada’s Skills with PIAAC Research: Historical 2025-2026 Call

This page is a historical reference, not an open funding opportunity. The Future Skills Centre (FSC) published its “Strengthening Canada’s Skills with PIAAC Research” call for proposals with a submission deadline of January 6, 2026 at 5 p.m. EST. That deadline has passed. FSC’s current engagement page says it does not currently have open calls for proposals, and the official material checked does not announce a successor PIAAC round. Do not treat the old application form as an active route to funding.

The call remains useful as a record of the research priorities, funding range, eligibility rules, and application expectations that FSC set for this PIAAC initiative. It also provides context for the projects that FSC later selected from the competition. Researchers looking for a future opportunity should monitor the Future Skills Centre directly and join its mailing list rather than relying on this archived listing.

At a glance

What the call was designed to fund

FSC framed the competition around a practical question: how can Canada make better use of evidence about adult skills when designing workforce policy and programs? The source dataset was PIAAC, the OECD’s international Survey of Adult Skills. FSC described PIAAC as a source of information about adult proficiency and its relationship to labour-market outcomes, productivity, social participation, and quality of life.

Cycle 2 was not optional background reading. The official call required applicants to use and analyze Cycle 2 data as part of the research design. The FAQ allowed teams to add administrative, survey, or qualitative data, and it allowed Cycle 1 or related datasets for comparison, but Cycle 2 had to remain central. That requirement matters for anyone using this page as a model for a future proposal: a general workforce study that only mentions PIAAC would not have matched the stated scope.

FSC wanted projects that addressed evidence gaps, strengthened Canadian capacity to work with PIAAC, and made findings usable outside an academic audience. The call encouraged diverse methodologies, including quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods designs. A credible project therefore needed both a well-defined research question and a clear explanation of why PIAAC was the right evidence source for it.

The official announcement also emphasized capacity building and knowledge mobilization. Proposals were expected to contribute to the ability of Canadian teams to work with PIAAC data, including mentoring a junior researcher and sharing methodological learning with other research teams. Findings were meant to reach policymakers, practitioners, employers, labour groups, and other stakeholders in forms they could understand and use.

Funding and eligible costs

The historical award range was $50,000 to $90,000 CAD per project. FSC said that customary research costs could be covered, including salaries for primary researchers, research assistants, and direct research expenses. The FAQ gives a more detailed picture of the budget boundary. Eligible costs included personnel and benefits, project administration up to 12% of the funding requested, participant honoraria, office services, required equipment and software, Statistics Canada micro-dataset access, professional services, translation, graphic design, alternative formats, research-related events, travel under applicable Canadian public-sector rates, and audit costs.

The budget was not intended to finance general institutional needs or an open-ended research program. FSC excluded proposal-development costs, capital costs, profit, costs unrelated to the deliverables, contingency or unexplained miscellaneous amounts, fines, interest, donations, and expenses already covered by other government funding. For a proposal in the original competition, the strongest budget would have connected each cost to a defined analysis, deliverable, or knowledge-mobilization activity.

The amount was large enough for a focused team but too limited for an expansive national program with many independent research questions. A sensible project would have prioritized a small number of analyses, reserved time for data access and quality checks, and funded outputs for both technical and non-technical readers. The short project period made this discipline especially important.

Who could apply

Applications could be submitted by a sole organization or by a partnership or consortium. FSC identified three broad eligible categories:

• Canadian post-secondary institutions.
• Not-for-profit research centres.
• For-profit organizations, provided the project was conducted at cost, with no mark-up or profit included.

Federal, provincial, and territorial government ministries and agencies were not eligible to apply directly. The call did not prevent those bodies from contributing expertise, advising a project, helping interpret findings, or receiving research outputs. A government relationship could strengthen a project’s route to use, but the application needed to be held by an eligible organization.

The structure favoured teams that could combine research competence with access to relevant policy or practice communities. A university or college might lead the analysis while a not-for-profit partner helped interpret results with adult learners, employers, or employment-service providers. A research firm could contribute project management and dissemination while working at cost. Whatever the arrangement, partners needed defined roles rather than a list of names added only to signal reach.

The call also encouraged meaningful attention to equity, diversity, inclusion, and Reconciliation. That did not mean adding generic language to the proposal. It meant explaining whose experiences would be visible in the analysis, how the team would avoid treating Canada’s adult population as uniform, and how partners or communities could shape interpretation and communication. The official announcement specifically pointed to inclusive leadership, diverse teams, partnerships with equity-deserving groups, and disaggregated analysis as possible parts of a strong design.

Research questions that fit the original scope

A competitive project would have started with a precise question tied to a decision or gap in Canadian skills policy. PIAAC can support analysis of literacy, numeracy, and adaptive problem solving, along with relationships to work, education, demographics, and well-being. The dataset is not a universal answer to every labour-market question, and the proposal needed to respect its sampling, measurement, and causal limits.

Examples of questions that fit the original call include:

• How do measured adult skills relate to job quality or skill use among immigrants at different stages of settlement?
• Where do literacy, numeracy, or adaptive problem-solving profiles line up poorly with occupational requirements, and what does that imply for employment services?
• How do adult-learning participation and barriers differ across demographic groups, regions, or work situations?
• What can comparisons across PIAAC cycles show about changes in Canada’s skill distribution, without treating those comparisons as proof that one program caused an outcome?

The selected projects later covered themes including immigrant skills and employment, social returns to skills, overqualification, skill shortages, adult learning, skills mismatch, NEET outcomes in Atlantic Canada, and adaptive problem-solving profiles. That range illustrates the breadth of the competition while also showing why a proposal needed a narrow central question. A team could investigate one meaningful relationship in depth; it could not responsibly promise to explain every aspect of adult skills in Canada within one short project.

Historical application process

There is no current application process for this call. The following describes the process FSC published for the closed competition and is retained for reference only.

1. Read the call guidelines. The guidelines contained the eligibility criteria, funding details, selection criteria, application timeline, process, and related instructions.
2. Review FSC’s Canadian skills research material. FSC strongly encouraged applicants to read Skills for Productivity, Prosperity and Well-being in Canada before developing a submission. The purpose was to connect a proposed study to identified knowledge gaps and a broader Canadian research agenda.
3. Define the team and project. Applicants needed an eligible lead organization, a workable partnership structure where applicable, a research question, a Cycle 2 data strategy, and a plan that could fit the project period.
4. Prepare the application materials. The online form required the substantive proposal information and supporting documentation. A complete submission needed to make the case for relevance, methodological quality, feasibility, expected outputs, team capability, and knowledge mobilization.
5. Submit through the online form. FSC provided English and French application forms and said that supporting documentation could be submitted through the same online application form. The form was the route for the closed competition; it should not be presented to readers as a live submission channel now.

For a future FSC call, applicants should use the new call’s own guidelines and portal. Requirements, budget limits, data expectations, and timing may change. Copying the historical form or the historical deadline into a new application would be unsafe.

Historical timeline and what happened next

FSC’s published plan was to communicate funding decisions starting in March 2026, begin projects in April 2026, and require completion no later than October 31, 2026. The official FAQ also said funded projects were requested to participate in a research seminar in October 2026. Those dates describe the closed competition’s delivery plan, not a current opportunity window.

FSC subsequently announced the selection of 10 research projects for the PIAAC initiative. The selected work covers the use of direct skill measures, immigrant employment outcomes, social returns, productivity, overqualification, adult learning, mismatch, Atlantic Canadian pathways, and adaptive problem solving. The announcement makes clear that the competition moved from application stage into a funded-project phase. It does not reopen the application period.

This distinction is important for readers. The call’s official page remains online and still displays its original instructions, including the past deadline and application links. A live page is not evidence that submissions are still being accepted. The current FSC engagement page separately states that there are no open calls for proposals at the moment. No new PIAAC application deadline is supplied by the official pages checked for this update.

How to use this page now

Use this entry for historical research, benchmarking, or proposal planning. It can help a team understand the scale of a Canadian PIAAC grant, the kind of organization that could hold the award, the expectation that Cycle 2 remain central, and the importance FSC placed on practical use of findings. It can also help applicants compare their own scope with the themes eventually selected.

Do not use it to infer that funding is available, that the $50,000-$90,000 range still applies, or that the old portal will accept a new proposal. Do not replace the historical deadline with a guessed annual recurrence. FSC has not announced a successor round in the official material checked. The responsible next step is to monitor FSC’s official announcements and mailing list for a new call, then read the new guidelines from the beginning.

The verified official record is the Future Skills Centre PIAAC call page. FSC’s later PIAAC project announcement records the 10 selected projects, and the current engagement page explains that no calls are currently open. Together, these pages support the historical status recorded here.