All Posts Tagged With: "youth unemployment in Canada"
Five things I learned from CBC’s Generation Jobless
What the experts are saying about the new jobs reality
austinevan/Flickr
CBC’s new Doc Zone documentary Generation Jobless covers some familiar terrain: well-educated young Canadians can’t find jobs and are instead stuck in serving jobs or cycling through unpaid internships. It’s much the same story Maclean’s covered here in The New Underclass. The show did, however, add some interesting ideas to the conversation. Here are five things I learned from watching it.
1. Master’s degrees make some people less employable because employers know the graduate’s pay expectations will be higher, says Lauren Friese, owner of the job site TalentEgg.
2. Technology giants aren’t our saviours. They’re not creating as many new jobs as we think. Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and Twitter combined employ just 20,000 people.
3. Even in economically choppy Europe, there are places with virtually no youth unemployment. Switzerland is one. There only 20 per cent of students are admitted to university, half as many as in Canada. Most start three-year apprenticeships at age 18 anywhere from factories to banks.
4. Futurist Thomas Frey says that jobs won’t be common in the future. Instead, the average person will have worked on hundreds of small projects by the time they’re 30. It’s also predicted that technology just over the horizon, like self-driving cars, will put even more people out of work.
5. Canada is rare among western nations in having no national strategy matching education and training to jobs. Diane Finley, Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, says a national strategy isn’t needed because education and training is the purview of the provinces.
Nearly 1 million young Canadians aren’t working or in school
But we’re doing better than Europe, U.S.
Photo by david_shankbone on Flickr
It’s a big number: 904,000 Canadians aged 15 to 29 were either unemployed or had opted out of the labour force in 2009, representing 13.3 per cent of people that age. The rest were split between school (44 per cent) and work (43 per cent), according to a Statistics Canada report.
Why care that so many young people weren’t working or in school? Well, Youth Not in Employment, Education or Training—NEETs for short—may become “discouraged, disengaged and socially excluded,” says StatsCan. Translation: they’re more likely up to no good.
Continue reading Nearly 1 million young Canadians aren’t working or in school
