The Summary:
I received data from Statistics Canada showing the unemployment rates among people aged 25 to 29 by education level, which I transformed in excel and merged with a KML file of provinces to create four heat maps from 2011 to 2012 for university and college-level educations. Some provinces did not release this information for university and are coloured red. This information was important as it showed what level of education leads to employment more. I also received data showing that there had been losses of workers in the job market, which brought some of the legitimacy of that statistic into question.
I also received data from Georgetown University from a study showing what majors have higher unemployment rates, which is also important as it shows what post-secondary pursuits lead to employment more.
I received a statistic from CBC about how many Canadians felt they were overqualified for their job, important to determine who is over-educated and in a part time job.
The graphs/data:
The sources:
Statistics Canada unemployment across Canada
Statistics Canada labour force change among 15 to 24 year olds
The story:
Over Educated, Under Employed
Stephen Sedgwick-Williams
Word Count: 1921
December 12, 2013
s.sedgwickwilliams@gmail.com
Tyler McDougall goes to work at his local Wal-Mart at the deli counter. He puts on an apron, cleans machines, changes the garbage, cleans tables and counters, cuts meat for customers, seasons chicken and takes temperatures to make sure that nothing has gotten too warm and gone bad.
He also graduated from Algonquin’s interactive multimedia developer program and takes contracts making websites when he can get them.
McDougall is just one of a generation of young people moving into the labour force after post-secondary education, something that was marketed at high-schools as required in order to get a job in the real world.
But like many, he found that what he was taught isn’t necessarily how the world works, knowing how to do a job isn’t the same as getting one and not all degrees are made equal.
“Right out of graduation my co-op hired me for two or three weeks to finish the project we were working on,” said McDougall, sitting in front of a large image showcasing notable works from media and design programs, one of his own works included. “And then I was unemployed for about six months and then through some people I know I ended up doing an interview at this company that does content management, website stuff.”
Tyler worked there for several months, before becoming unemployed once more and seeking out any work he could get.
“I applied at a bunch of retail stuff and got Wal-Mart, and since then I kind of just work at Wal-Mart,” McDougall said. “Every once in a while I pick up a contract for a website here or there.”
Statistically, Tyler is not alone. According to data released by Statistics Canada, in 2012 nation-wide 6.2 per cent of adults aged 25 to 29 with college or trade school education were unemployed, and 5.8 per cent of university educated adults the same age were unemployed. The overall unemployment rate across all levels of education for that age range was 7.4 per cent.
That’s only for 25 to 29-year-olds, the rate is higher for those aged 15 to 24 as stated in a paper released by Statistics Canada, revealing a 14.3 per cent overall unemployment rate for that age range.
With statistics such as these and the growing number of horror stories of educated people who spent thousands of dollars on their degrees, some wonder if post-secondary education is worth less now than in the past.
“I think so,” says McDougall. “I have a lot of friends who are also graduated and one of them works at Tim Hortons, I mean I work at Wal-Mart.”
In Tyler’s opinion, the college diploma and university degree have become the new high-school diploma.
“You need it to get a job,” says McDougall. “But it’s not going to get you a job, you need experience and charisma and all that stuff to get a job.”
But sometimes it’s the lack of experience in areas some wouldn’t consider that can cause an issue for students emerging into the labour force.
How many graduates have gotten good grades, earned their degree and excelled in co-op, only to start sending out resumes to never hear from companies again, or attend an interview and not get the job?
For Joanne McDonald, career services and student activities manager, helping students learn what they need to sell themselves and close the deal is of huge importance.
“We help guide them through the process of looking for work, securing employment,” said McDonald, sitting at a clean meeting table in the Algonquin student employment services office. “We help them with understanding not only how to write a resume and a cover letter for example, but also how to prepare for an interview, some students have never been to what they call a formal interview.”
These skills can be just as important as the ones learned in an actual program and need to be trained the same way.
“You build those skills,” said McDonald. “The same way you would build skills in accounting, or as a paramedic, or as a nurse, or in business, you need to build those skills.
Job search, it doesn’t come naturally to most of us, it does take work and it takes practise.”
Of course, experience never hurts either when trying to get a job in an industry either.
“Experience is always advantageous,” said McDonald. “Whether it’s co-op, whether it’s volunteer work, whether it’s a student who creates an allegiance early on with an association that is in their industry or field and they start to create that network, it’s always to their advantage to be involved in something like that.”
But even with that, make sure that you start early.
From the time a student steps into Algonquin college I start would to recommend that they think about what the labour market looks like for them,” said McDonald. “Now they may be in a three year diploma and three years seems like a long, long way down the road, but it will go by in the blink of an eye.
I would say from the time they set foot in here they should looking for opportunities to be able to network, with their classmates, with their faculty, with employers.”
But even then, there are just some degrees that aren’t made equal to others. According to a study released by Georgetown University centre on education and the workforce in the United States, certain college degrees have much higher unemployment rates than others.
Not only that, but despite university graduates overall having a lower unemployment rate, even some majors there vary wildly in their unemployment rates, some ranking lower than college diplomas in their field.
Some students are aware that not all degrees necessarily lead to jobs afterwards.
Graeme Kent is a graduate of Algonquin’s interactive multimedia developer program and a former classmate of McDougall. He currently works as a part-timer for the college’s information technology services, as a part of the events team setting up equipment for events, recording them and making videos.
“I can really only speak for the technology field,” said Kent. “It’s ever changing, but you gotta look out for which areas are being flooded.”
For some degrees, the issue is that so many people enter into the major that the job market it specializes in gets over saturated, leaving everyone in that field competing against everyone else, while the employers can pick and chose only those best suited to them with the widest skill sets.
“As far as people coming out of high school go,” said Kent. “They flood game development a lot, and if you’re someone who just likes programming, or just likes the graphic design element, you’re going to have to adapt and you’re going to have to learn to cover all of those, you can’t do just one.”
The key, according to Graeme, is to specialize in things others may have overlooked.
“If anything seems way too popular, there might not be too many jobs in it,” said Kent. “You gotta look for things like COBOL programming.
Programmers that work with COBOL, a language used by companies and banks in their databases, are currently retiring from the industry opening jobs in an industry needing workers to fix and maintain necessary infrastructure.
Nick Batten, a former student of biology at the University of Ottawa and a current financial accounting student at Algonquin, also believes that more specialized degrees and diplomas can lead to jobs more often.
“I’d say that people who take a social science or history degree will have a harder time finding a position than someone who takes a degree like engineering, medicine, law, some of the deep sciences,” said Batten. “But even those can have a harder too if they’re too specialized.”
The statistics back up his belief, according to the Georgetown study college diplomas in social science and the arts were both in the top five unemployment rates for recent graduates, along with recreations, the humanities and architecture.
On the opposite side of the scale, diplomas in engineering stood in the middle of the pack, just between life sciences and business graduates and unemployment rates in health were the lowest for recent graduates, tied with education.
The results from graduate degrees were similar, with social sciences and arts degrees again at the top of the unemployment charts, along with architecture, business and, interestingly enough, computers, while health was again the major with the lowest unemployment rates; only 1.9 per cent.
Batten does warn against getting too specialized in your educational pursuits though.
“If somebody’s specializing in a certain kind of biology, like they’re specializing specifically in plant or fish biology, it’s going to be harder in some areas to get positions for that,” said Batten. “You’re not going to be able to become a fish biologist in northern Saskatchewan, I don’t think.”
If you’re going into a more specialized major like that, Batten recommends that you have a job in mind before entering the job market.
“A friend of mine didn’t have a job she wanted to apply for but she went for a very specialized religion-oriented degree at St. Paul’s and now is unable to do anything with it.”
But even if you choose a specialized degree, you may want to pursue a co-op and get experience in the workforce too, which the Georgetown study shows decreases unemployment rates in all majors.
“They have the experience working in the field,” Batten said in regard to students with experience. “They’d already have an established network of contacts and that would play a big part in getting a job after post-secondary education.”
Kent agrees and says that volunteer work can also be a helping factor.
“Take volunteer positions, you always see people posting online, ‘you can’t get work without experience, you can’t get experience without work.’” Kent said. “Yeah you can, it’s called volunteering.”
The situation isn’t perfect though and while Statistics Canada shows unemployment rates among university and college educated individuals between the ages of 25 and 29 are falling, that may not mean that everyone is getting a job.
“Yeah a lot of people probably do get jobs after college,” said McDougall. “But it’s probably not to do with what they went to college for. I mean technically I’m employed, but Wal-Mart’s not what I went to college for.”
A report by Statistics Canada also shows that 6.6 per cent of the labour force aged 15 to 24 left the labour force between 2008 and 2009 and another 1.7 per cent left between 2011 and 2012.
But even then there is some good news, for those aged 25 to 44 Statistics Canada shows that the labour force has broken even, if not grown, and still the unemployment rate between the ages of 25 and 29 has dropped.
For those concerned about the worth of a post-secondary degree Statistics Canada also shows that having a post-secondary education significantly decreases the unemployment rate for Canadians.
In the end, some see things as getting better and encourage students to study what jobs are available.
“I think things are getting better,” said McDonald. “I think, too, new job seekers need to be aware of what’s available in the labour market, and how to tap into that.”
Perhaps the most important thing you can do is make yourself stand out.
“The jobs are there,” said Kent. “You just have to wade your way through everyone else.”