Friday, August 7, 2020

"Despite all the doom and gloom, these kids will likely be all right"/ "Youth need more in-person contact, less time online to find work: report"

Oct. 29, 2016 "Despite all the doom and gloom, these kids will likely be all right": Today I found this article by Garry Marr in the Edmonton Journal.  It is a happy and positive article.

Today I found a negative article "A new reality: dealing with 'job churn'" by Rachelle Younglai in the Globe and Mail. It was basically the sad statistics of millennials in mostly contract and temp jobs.  I couldn't copy and paste it here.  Here is the Marr article: 


The newest generation of workers have better job prospects than their parents ever did, at least according to a new report that says the tech-savvy nature of the country’s largest cohort will serve it well.

Laura Cooper, an economist with Royal Bank of Canada, looked at the future for the 9.8 million Canadians between 20 and 34 and says they are in “the driver’s seat” and will dominate Canada’s future in the same way that baby boomers did before them.

“Canadian millennials have inherited a labour environment in many ways better than that of their parents,” writes Cooper, who cites rising female participation in the workforce, increasing educational attainment and narrowing of wage differential as emerging trends.

The economist says the rise of computers, the Internet and then smartphones coincided with the early years of that cohort and will serve them well in the future.

“For this generation, communicating through mobile devices and social media, engaging in ecommerce and consuming and producing digital content are second nature,” Cooper says.

“These abilities ensure they will have a significant impact on the evolution of Canadian economic activity.”

Cooper says the youngest workers are pursuing more education, which is contributing to a larger share of them working part-time.

In 2015, 35 per cent of 20- to 24-year-olds in Canada worked part-time, versus 10 per cent in 1979.

On the full- time front, they may appear to have less job security, but they change jobs about as frequently as baby boomers. 

On average, generation Y workers stay at a full-time job 19 months, which compares with 21 months for baby boomers back in 1979, and hold part-time jobs 17.5 months on average versus 15 months for baby boomers in 1979.

“These figures suggest that the path to establishing a career isn’t that much different for millennials. Notably, the unemployment rate for 20- to 24-year-olds was 10.4 per cent in both 1979 and 2015,” Cooper says.

The economist also points to a generational spike in entrepreneurship, with the share of self employed 15- to 24-year-olds doubling over the last two decades. The proportion of all startups owned by someone under the age of 30 reached nine per cent in 2014.

Women also are poised to benefit from a more level playing field as they begin to comprise a greater share of graduates with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) degrees compared with previous generations.

In science and technology, 59 per cent of degree holders are female. Nevertheless, in 2015 Canadian women still earned 87 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

Cooper also says family dynamics have changed, with only 31 per cent of the cohort married or living in common-law partnerships in 2015, down from 44 per cent for baby boomers in 1970.

The average age of a woman giving birth to her first child has increased by two years over the past three decades, which has helped shrink the average family size to 3.0 in 2016 from 3.3 in 1981.

For this generation, communicating through mobile devices and social media, engaging in ecommerce and consuming and producing digital content are second nature. Royal Bank of Canada economist Laura Cooper



Dec. 22, 2016 "Youth need more in-person contact, less time online to find work: report": Today I found this article by Jordan Press in the Edmonton Journal.  It is about the importance of networking:

OTTAWA — A new report from the federal government's expert panel on youth employment points to a need to move away from digital services for young, first-time job seekers and instead offer more person-to-person contacts and services.

In an interim report released Wednesday, the panel described how young people complete hundreds of online job applications without receiving any response from employers and that the reliance on using personal networks to find jobs is unreasonably high.

Young people with the most success at landing a job do so through the people they know and for those without such a network, the necessity to build connections can be overly intimidating, the report said.

"We are deluding ourselves if we think that by digitizing the job application process we are making it more democratic. Network effects are as strong as ever and this hurts young people with less social capital," said panel chair Vass Bednar.

The panel's interim report found young Canadians have high levels of anxiety about their future work prospects, even those with post-secondary education and previous job experience — two keys frequently cited as an avenue to a good job.

A Statistics Canada study released earlier this month showed that young people have seen their job quality decline over 40 years, even as the youth unemployment rate has remained relatively unchanged. In both 1976 and 2015 it was 2.3 times higher than the rate among those aged 25 and older.

The unemployment rate for job seekers aged 15 to 24 was 12.9 per cent in November, according to Statistics Canada. The youth unemployment rate in Ontario was 13.5 per cent.

The Liberals made sweeping promises to young Canadians as part of their election platform.

One plank has yet to materialize as federal policy: a vow to waive employment insurance premiums for 12 months for any employer who gives someone between the ages of 18 and 24 a full-time job.

Labour Minister MaryAnn Mihychuk said the government is still considering the measure and is working out the kinks on other possible tax credits to create incentives for companies to give a young person their first job.

"What we want to do is ensure that what we're doing is the most effective, to give it the broadest range and make it accessible for many, many youth," she said.

Mihychuk said the government is planning a big push on what's known as work-integrated learning models where students earn school credits while working in their field, such as through a co-op placement or internship.

Federal officials have been looking at those kinds of models since shortly after the Liberals took office, particularly programs like co-op education at the University of Waterloo, to connect employers with schools so students gain the skills needed to have a successful job hunt.

"This is one piece of a bigger plan. We knew from going door to door in the election and even before that the situation for young people in Canada was pretty tough and that we needed to make changes," Mihychuk said.



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