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In British Columbia, the government established a new program in 1994 called Skills Now! The program aimed to restructure the province's educational system to meet the demands of the 'new workplace'. This chapter critically analyses the Skills Now! program and its attempts to link education more closely with work. Officially described as being oriented towards increasing social equity, developing skills, and reducing unemployment, the program demanded that educators make the workplace more central to their teaching. The author uses a qualitative methodology, examining data from policy documentation and interviews with key policy actors, to examine the program's multiple perspectives and underlying assumptions. The program is discussed as rhetoric, as educational philosophy, and as economic policy and in terms of the construction of skills and social justice. The author concludes that Skills Now! was a brief, two-year policy that may have had little impact if not for the degree to which it came together with a 'pervasive rhetoric of therapy' for changing economic conditions that has become standard across North America.