All Posts Tagged With: "work"
More students balance school with jobs
New report shows surprising trends in Quebec
A long night at work. By star5112 on Flickr.
More than half of full-time university students in Quebec work while attending school and more than 40 per cent of all undergraduates work more than 20 hours weekly says a new study by the Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec, a provincial lobby group that wants lower tuition.
On top of that, more than twice as many full-time students aged 20 to 24 in the province work part-time jobs than students did in the 1970s.
The workloads are hurting their educations: 43 per cent of full-time undergraduates say that their jobs have negatively affected their studies and 30 per cent say their jobs mean they’ll take longer to finish. It’s worst for PhD students—six in 10 say work forced them to prolong their studies.
It may be even tougher to find a job next year
Campus recruiters plan on less hiring, same pay
Job fair photo by stevendepolo on Flickr
A survey of 324 Canadian employers shows that they expect post-secondary graduates will still be struggling to find work in 2012.
Recruiters who hire students are projecting 2.9 per cent fewer job offers in 2012 and no increase in starting pay, according to the 2011 Campus Recruitment and Benchmark Survey. The survey was collected on behalf of The Canadian Association of Career Educators and Employers between August 1 and September 26, 2011.
Since then, the economic outlook has worsened. In October, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty cut his growth forecast for 2011 from 2.9 per cent to 2.2 per cent. Earlier this month, TD Economics reduced its forecast for growth in GDP next year from 1.9 to 1.7 per cent due to weakness in Europe that is likely to spread. Scotia Capital is predicting 1.8 per cent growth. That follows last year’s post-recession rebound of 3.2 per cent.
Continue reading It may be even tougher to find a job next year
Millenials shun the 9-to-5 workday
But work hours aren’t their top priority
Photo by La Citta Vita on Flickr
The Millenial generation (roughly defined as those born after 1980) aren’t too interested in the traditional 9-to-5 workday, branding expert Dan Schawbel writes on Time.com Schawbel provides examples of American companies that are accommodating this preference.
There’s evidence that Canada’s Millenials value flexible hours too—though it’s not their top priority.
Canadians researchers surveyed 3,000 people last year to gauge the differences between what four generations of working Canadians value in their jobs. Millenials placed “hours of work” at #7 on their list. Generation X workers (those born 1965 to 1979) ranked work hours slightly lower—at #8. But Baby Boomers (born 1946 to 1964) and those born earlier than 1945, “Mature” workers, didn’t have “hours of work” in their top 10 at all. It seems they’re comfortable working 9-to-5.
This degree is practically a job guarantee
And Saskatchewan may give you $20,000
For students who want a guaranteed job after graduation, nothing comes closer than nursing in Saskatchewan. According to the Regina Leader-Post, the government has hired 900 nurses since 2008, but could need as many as 2,000 more in the next two years if those set to retire do so as planned. There were already 449 nursing jobs being advertised in the province last month.
The government has increased seats at post-secondary schools for registered nurses dramatically in the past four years: from 300 in 2006 to 690 now, but that likely won’t be enough.
That’s why, in last week’s Throne Speech, the government announced that seats in universities to train nurse practitioners—highly-paid advanced nurses who often have the ability prescribe drugs—will grow from 30 to 50 per year. The shortage is also the reason the government says it will forgive $20,000 of student loans for recent nursing graduates who work in rural and remote communities for at least five years. It’s easy to see why Saskatchewan is being so agreesive about training, wooing and keeping nurses: neighbouring Alberta is on a nurse hiring spree right now too.
Ontario’s recession-era grads did alright
High employment rates. Steady wages.
One of the biggest surveys that gauges how university graduates have fared in the workplace was published this week and the results show that university is still a very good bet for most people.
The figures come from a survey of nearly 20,000 graduates from Ontario’s class of 2008, courtesy of the Council of Ontario Universities. Despite the global recession that has hampered employment since 2008, nearly 19 out of 20 graduates (93.8 per cent) were in jobs by 2010.
83.5 per cent of their jobs were somewhat or closely related to their fields of study, higher than usual.
The jobs paid well too, $49,469 on average, which is slightly higher than the median income for all Canadians. (Remember, these students were only two years into their careers.) But pay is stagnant. In fact, it was slightly higher for 2004 and 2006 graduates two years after their convocations.
Brandon University strike talks to resume Monday
Students can’t be punished for not crossing picket lines
Photo by ggbaker on Panoramio
There has been a lot of misinformation about the current strike by Brandon University’s Faculty Association (BUFA). Here’s what we do know.
Reports earlier this week suggested that students will be punished if they choose to skip the classes of any professor who chooses to go back to work before the strike ends. President Deborah Poff wrote Tuesday that no student was ever at risk of being punished. “Students have a right not to cross a picket line,” she wrote. “It is an act of political and moral conscience, and Brandon University will not discriminate against students for their political beliefs.”
It was also reported that talks had broken off on Wednesday, as the conciliator had returned to Winnipeg. But BUFA writes today that although the two sides will not meet again until Monday, that’s because the conciliator is unavailable until then, not because talks had broken off. BUFA also confirmed that they have rejected the schools’ offers for arbitration or mediation and arbitration.
Continue reading Brandon University strike talks to resume Monday
Are young Canadians really better off than young Americans?
Why our leaders shouldn’t dismiss the Occupy Movement
Occupy Winnipeg photo by marygkosta on Flickr
Jamie Weinman has a post on Maclean’s.ca suggesting that student debt is fuelling the Occupy Everywhere protests. Weinman quotes this Washington Post article by Ezra Klein who writes that “college debt represents a special sort of betrayal.” He says he began supporting the protests after seeing a photo on the Tumblr site, “We are the 99 percent.” It was of a handwritten sign by a student that said: “I did everything I was supposed to and I have nothing to show for it.”
Their point is this. While many of the people hurt by the financial crisis should have known better—people who took out mortgages they knew they couldn’t afford and bankers who invested in financial instruments they knew were overrated—students who took on debt are different. They went into debt because they had been told repeatedly by parents, teachers, politicians and the media that educational debt is a sure route to higher paying jobs. Now that we know that’s often untrue, can we really blame them for being angry?
Continue reading Are young Canadians really better off than young Americans?
The decline of the B.A. continues
But will business degrees really lead to better jobs?
Photo by JSmith Photo on Flickr
Communication, critical thinking and problem solving are just a few of the skills that are gained from an arts education. But for many students, that list of skills doesn’t add up to a job, so they’re choosing business instead.
Worries about the decline of the Bachelor of Arts aren’t new. But when Ontario universities welcomed their biggest class ever this year, the headlines masked the fact that arts programs shrunk in size again in the province, this year by 0.3 per cent. Job-focused programs such as business accounted for much of the growth, increasing 2.9 per cent.
It’s not a new trend. Data from the Ontario Universities Application Centre (OUAC) show that between 2006 and 2010, in the average year, arts confirmations for first-year students coming from high school decreased on average by five per cent (that includes fine and applied arts, humanities, and social sciences). Business and commerce saw an increase of approximately 12 per cent.
Journalists are gettin’ schooled
Why master of journalism degrees are big news in 2011
Photo courtesy of thivierr on Flickr
Carmen Smith used to think she didn’t need graduate school. And why would she? Even before finishing her bachelor of journalism degree at Bennett College in Greensboro, N.C., Smith was the publisher of a women’s magazine called Belle, which she founded.
But she changed her mind after an academic adviser told her about a new master’s in journalism program offered at King’s College in Halifax that could help her do better with her own publication. “I really thought it was interesting to see how they were developing their program around entrepreneurial journalism,” Smith recalls. “That’s why I came.”
Smith, now 22, is one of a growing number of wannabe journalists heading to master’s programs in Canada. Before 2000, there were only two degrees available in the country, at Carleton University and the University of Western Ontario. Today, there are six, with the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University both gearing up their own programs.
What to do if you don’t get into medical school
From the 2011 Maclean’s Professional Schools Rankings
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Roughly three-quarters of medical school applicants are rejected each year. Bummer. Luckily for them, wannabe doctors have better alternatives than ever. These four professional health care programs can be completed in just a few years, are in high demand, and pay well directly out of school. That means graduates can start paying off their student loans while medical residents are still driving beat-up old cars to 24-hour shifts.
Health Care Manager
The Job: Health care managers work in hospitals, medical clinics and nursing homes where they direct teams of health care providers. Their job is to make sure patients get excellent care and, simultaneously, that Canadians get good value for the nearly $200 billion they spend on health care each year.
Continue reading What to do if you don’t get into medical school
Education is “good employment insurance”
But it was a bad summer for student job hunters
Photo courtesy of EthanLong on Flickr
Unemployment among university graduates in rich countries, including Canada, remained a low 4.4 per cent in 2009, the year of the global recession, according to a new study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. That same year, unemployment for those without higher education shot up from 8.7 per cent to 11.5 per cent. The OECD’s conclusion? Education is “a good employment insurance.”
But the organization is worried about falling public investment in education. Between 2000 and 2008, the share of private funding for post-secondary schools rose in 20 of the 26 countries studied. “Despite strained public budgets, governments must keep up their investment to maintain quality in education, especially for those most at risk,” said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría.
McGill non-academic support staff on strike
Classes will go ahead as planned: university
McGill University’s 1,700 non-academic employees went on strike at 6 a.m. this morning. The employees provide course registration, laboratory support, clerical support, record keeping, student residence management, IT support and more.
University classes will go ahead next week. ”You have the right, as a student or an employee, to cross the picket line to get to class or to your work,” the university wrote in a statement. “McGill will ensure that you can enter the campus safely.”
The collective agreement expired in Dec. 2010. MUNACA wants a three per cent wage increase. McGill has offered 1.2 per cent.*
The workers say they also want more secure benefits. ”Unlike other university workers in Quebec, there are no protections for our pensions and benefits at McGill,” wrote McGill University Non-Academic Certified Association (MUNACA) president Kevin Whittaker. “The time has come for the university to recognize our hard work and our contribution to the quality of life students enjoy.”
*This post has been updated to remove salary data that was incorrect. Maclean’s On Campus regrets the error.
Ontario Liberals would double teacher’s college
More classroom experience needed, they say
Ontario’s governing Liberals say that if they’re re-elected on Oct. 6, they would double the length of teacher’s college programs from one to two years.
“The new two-year program would mean that student teachers would spend more time in the classroom,” the Liberals wrote a press release. “Ontario’s one-year teacher education program is one of the shortest in Canada. Other places in the world where students rank high in standardized tests — such as Japan, Singapore and Finland — have multi-year programs.” They point out that Ontario teachers graduate with only 40 days experience.
Ontario capped enrollment in teacher’s colleges in May in response to high unemployment among new teachers.
Sociology job market improves
But jobs available don’t match students’ interests
Photo courtesy of poptech on Flickr
It’s been a tumultuous few years for those graduating with sociology doctorates in North America. In 2009, the number of job listings for entry-level professors plunged by 35 per cent.
But new numbers show that listings increased 32 per cent in 2010 — a near recovery. It’s all in the American Sociological Association’s new report, Moving Toward Recovery.
It’s not all good news, however. The report also surveyed PhD candidates and found some major mismatches between their “areas of special interest” and the jobs that were available in 2010.
One of the widest gaps is in criminology (a.k.a. social control, crime, law and deviance), which made up 31 per cent of all postings on the ASA’s job site in 2010, but was only listed as an area of special interest for 18 per cent of PhD candidates whom were surveyed by the ASA.
The mechanically challenged generation
Young people today can’t hold a hammer or screw a screw
Photo courtesy of B Rosen on Flickr
By Cynthia Reynolds
It’s hard not to laugh when Barry Smith starts telling stories about the hapless young workers he has to deal with. Smith, who runs Toronto-area roofing company RoofSmith Canada, tells of one who didn’t come to work because his cat had fleas, and another who jumped off a shed roof, even though he’d just tossed bags of nails into the garbage bin below. But the laughing tapers off when Smith, 46, talks about skills.
“They don’t know how to handle a tool properly,” he says quietly. “They’re bright kids, but they hold a hammer at the top instead of the bottom, so it takes four swings instead of one to get a nail in. They don’t know how to read the short lines on a tape measure and they’ve never used power tools, which makes you really cautious.” He says they can’t seem to detect the patterns of the work—you rip up part of the roof, that gets thrown down, that goes into the garbage—so they just stand around. “It can get really frustrating.”
Volunteering for experience
Jeff Rybak takes aim at the “extremely negative trend” of unpaid internships
Like just about anyone with a social circle of twenty-something friends, I know a lot of people who are un(der)employed. Most of them have completed post-secondary degrees and diplomas – in some cases more than one. More and more I’m hearing about offers they receive concerning unpaid internships, volunteer opportunities and the like. At times they are forced to even consider these offers. I’d refuse to describe these things as “offers” and “opportunities” if not for the fact that I can “offer” someone the “opportunity” to get punched in the face several times. Grammatically it is correct. But not in any other sense.
Moral outrage aside, there are four distinct reasons why this is an extremely negative trend. Two of them are public policy reasons. The free labour takes the place of paid jobs, and to the extent that these positions lead to real opportunities the fact that they aren’t paid lends gross advantages to the already privileged. Two other reasons are purely personal. Working for free will low-ball the value of your labour, and exactly because these positions aren’t paid the legitimacy of the experience you gain will always be in doubt.
Free Labour
The problem of free labour has been well explored in connection with workfare. I tried to find a relatively non-partisan explanation of the workfare experience in Ontario and this is the best I could come up with. Most organizations are much more scathing on the topic, but comparisons to slavery are probably counter-productive. There’s no need to so rhetorical about it anyway. The problems are right there on the face on things.
Just as in workfare, unpaid positions in the workforce (whether billed as volunteer positions, internships, whatever) do not become full-time jobs. Unpaid interns are replaced with new unpaid interns. In an ideal situation one might hope that the last unpaid intern moves on to a paid position somewhere else (see below) or even in the same organization, but regardless the work stays in that unpaid position. So whatever the value of the experience the work performed in any position such as this is work that has been permanently removed from the paid workforce. Any argument that this work would not exist otherwise is idiotic and self-defeating. If it’s completely made-up work then it can’t have much value as experience. And if it’s meaningful work then someone would be getting paid to do it, if not for the unending stream of people willing to make victims of themselves in the hope of it leading to something better.
I say “willing,” by the way, because I’m back on the topic of volunteer positions and internships. In the case of the workforce it’s anything but voluntary. But my intention isn’t to focus on that topic. I just want to illustrate a basic point of logic. For everyone who does a job for free in the hope of scoring a coveted position in some field of work, there’s actually one less paid job in that field. And everyone loses.
The Already Privileged
Of course some lose more than others. The Globe ran a great article on the issue of prestigious internships getting auctioned for charity – so instead of getting paid you actually pay (potentially big bucks) for the privilege of the experience. And privilege it is. Who can afford such a thing? The already wealthy, of course. And I do hope we can agree there are problems with this. We accept that money can buy elite education, private tutors, that privilege often contributes to networking opportunities, etc. But surely it’s a problem once it becomes even the way to buy your way directly into the workforce. Anywhere else we’d simply call this graft. But the charity angle does complicate things.
These high-profile examples aside, even your garden-variety unpaid internship is out of reach for many people. Folks need to eat and pay the rent and even (God forbid) support children. Only a limited sampling of people can move back home with their parents, or hit them up for living expenses, or fall back on a trust fund. The rest simply can’t afford to live without an income. So let’s believe for a moment that these “opportunities” are opportunities in any sort of true sense. Who’s getting them? Certainly not the most qualified or the most deserving. Just those with money
I’m aware that many people aren’t in a good position to worry about these public policy concerns. When you’ve got problems of your own to worry about it’s easy to say “life isn’t fair” and just do what you need to do. I respect that. So now I’ll get into the reasons why I believe that most of these positions are bad for the individual as well as bad for the community.
Low-balling Your Value
If there’s one thing I’ve learned from business students (and they have an interesting perspective on things) it’s that once you set a value on something you can’t erase that number. The number can go up or it can go down but the value you try to place on that thing will always be judged in relation to the past. I hear that frequently from recent graduates casting around for entry-level positions. They say things like “it’s a good job, with some interesting prospects, but I know if I enter the workforce at $38k/year I’ll be stuck down there for a long time.” And that’s an extremely good point. So what if you enter the workforce at $0/k year?
Actually, I can see the benefit of that in one regard. It’s more like having no income history at all rather than a low one. I’m willing to believe that maybe in the best positions it isn’t a problem that you started out by working for free. But most of these unpaid positions aren’t the fantastic kind that go up on the auction block at charity events. Most of them are the step that comes before the entry-level position and salary. So how exactly do you negotiate your starting salary from any position of strength when the person across the table knows that last time you agreed to work for nothing? Unless you’re one of those independently-wealthy types, who can continue to work for nothing as long as you want until the right offer comes along, there’s got to be a limit. The need to pay the bills will trump any desire to hold out for a good income.
Many people eventually face this soul-crushing choice, and realize that it’s better to volunteer than do nothing at all. I can see the logic to that and I wouldn’t advise against it. But I’d add that it isn’t any way at all to jump to the front of the queue for a real job. You’re far better taking paid work at any level with the intention to move up from there than doing it for free. Either way you’re stuck low-balling your value. But at least in the later instance you can salvage some of your dignity. And more than that, when you apply for better jobs it will be apparent from your CV that the first job you held, no matter the low income, was indeed a real job.
