New Section on ContactPoint: Report & Trends

ContactPoint is pleased to announce the launch of its Reports & Trends section that allows career practitioners to more readily access information that impacts their work and their clients. The new section includes fact sheets, policy papers and statistical reports about:

• Labour market information
• Recruitment
• Employment policy
• Workplace conditions
• Education and training
• Migration
• Skills development
• Foreign qualifications
• Specific labour market participants (e.g., youth, women, older workers, people with disabilities and new Canadians).

We are gathering this material from over 30 content providers across Canada and the world. Publishers include government, not-for-profit community organizations, think tanks, financial institutions and public opinion groups. Material is updated on a weekly basis with typically 10 new items added per week.

Here are the highlights of two reports that are currently available:

Older Workers in the Labour Market

TD Economics, a division of TD Canada Trust, publishes labour, finance and industry-related information products. TD Economics published a special report in February about older workers in the labour force. The authors argue in Older workers stampeded into the labour market that since the recovery began in mid-2009 individuals aged 60 years and older have accounted for about one-third of all net new job gains.

This is especially striking considering older workers accounted for just 8% of the total labour force. It is explained that nationally most of the job gains during the recovery have been concentrated in service-based industries such as professional, scientific and technical services and health care. While older workers recorded substantial gains in the each of these rapidly growing sectors, they made the most gains in the retail sector.

The report notes that several factors are fuelling the increased participation of older workers in the labour force including: the rise of non-standard employment arrangements, better health outcomes later in life allowing older Canadians to work longer, the end of mandatory retirement, advances in technology which have led to fewer physically intensive occupations, shortages of skilled labour, and having to work because the economic downturn has hurt retirement savings.

Career Preferences of Boys and Girls

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), formed in 1961 and representing 34 countries, strives to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The OECD published What kinds of careers do boys and girls expect for themselves in 2011 based upon data that asked 15-year-old students what they thought they would be doing in early adulthood.

The report states that in almost all OECD countries, girls are more ambitious than boys. On average, girls were 11% more likely than boys to expect to work in high-status careers such as legislators, senior officials, managers and professionals. The report also notes that in recent years, girls in many countries have caught up with or even surpassed boys in science proficiency.

Better performance in science or mathematics among girls, however, does not necessarily mean that girls want to pursue all types of science-related careers. In fact, careers in engineering or computing still attract relatively few girls. On average among OECD countries, fewer than 5% of girls, but 18% of boys, expected to be working in engineering or computing as young adults. Although few girls expected to enter some science careers in every OECD country, more girls than boys reported that they wanted to pursue a career in health services, a science profession with a caring component.

The authors mention that Charles and Grusky’s concept of cultural gender essentialism may explain these patterns. According to this theory, the preferences of women and men, and subsequently their employment paths, are rooted in cultural and institutional phenomena. The ideology of gender essentialism represents women as “more competent than men in service, nurturance and social interaction.”

CERIC hopes that ContactPoint’s new Reports & Trends section will prove to be a valuable resource for career service professionals.

Last Updated on Thursday, 26 July 2012 15:05