Scott Blurton for Capital Ward 2014 Platform

Youth Unemployment

The Challenge

• Ever since the onset of the Great Recession in 2008, the rise of youth employment has concerned policy makers across the world.

• Young adults in the 20's and and early 30's, who have invested tens of thousands of dollars and years of their lives on their education and training, have been unable to get their careers started.

• Chronic unemployment or underemployment has forced young Canadians to delay home ownership, start a family or save for retirement.

• Furthermore, young Canadians have been forced to depend more on their parents for housing and financial support, placing greater pressure on their parents and their financial security.

Causes of Youth Unemployment

• There are typically three causes cited for the rise of youth unemployment:

• the experience gap,

• exclusion from working networks; and

• stagnant growth in full-time employment.

Experience Gap

• The experience gap occurs when an economy's entry level jobs demand a level of experience that is difficult if not impossible for young Canadians to attain through their education or training.

• In times when labour opportunities are restricted, employers have greater leverage to demand more skills, more expertise and more experience for entry level jobs.

• Young Canadians have been forced to compete for these jobs with older and more experienced Canadians, who have seen their own prospects curtailed and are forced to seek entry level positions due to the lack of mid and late-career opportunities available in the labour market.

• While the economy has recovered the job prospects for older Canadians have improved as well. However, young Canadians are getting left behind. Unable to get the work experience they need to get over the experience gap, young Canadians continue to struggle getting their careers started.

Exclusion from Working Networks

• The inability to get that entry level job has prevented many young Canadians from developing the professional network needed to grow and develop their careers.

• This exclusion from working networks has forced young Canadians to depend more on online search tools, cold calling and unsolicited resume submission for entering their chosen careers.

• In many cases, young Canadians who have been forced to take employment outside of their preferred careers find that they are forced to remain in these jobs because they can't develop the networks in the career in which they've trained.

Stagnant Growth of Full-Time Employment

• Finally, the stagnant growth in full time employment in the five years following the recession has restricted the opportunities for all Canadians to advance in their careers.

• If experienced Canadians are unable to move onto higher value opportunities, then young Canadians will remain unable to break into the entry level jobs needed to start their careers.

• In short, the ultimate answer to any unemployment or underemployment challenge is growth, working hard to create new jobs.

What Ottawa Can Do• While there are many actions that we

can take on youth unemployment (tax credits, funds, support services), the City of Ottawa can take a leadership role through several strategies:

• Invest in the entrepreneurs of tomorrow

• Implement a skills-focused promotion strategy for investment

• Promote the values and skills that young Canadians can offer employers

• Establish the City of Ottawa as the central hub for employment

• Work towards labour market freedom through Open Data

Invest in the Entrepreneurs of Tomorrow

• For entrepreneurship, we actually have a pretty good resource in Invest Ottawa, in particular their provision of free seminars on starting and operating your business.

• What we need to do is to promote these opportunities to post-secondary students.

• It’s not just about developing young talent but developing young entrepreneurs from the day they enter university or college.

• We need to work better with post-secondary institutions to offer young Canadians more opportunities to develop their ideas and talent into enterprises so that when they graduate, they will have the 3-5 years of work experience as an entrepreneur to overcome the experience gap.

• We need to work harder to connect youth to federal and provincial programs such as the Ontario Jobs Strategy (specifically the Ontario Youth Innovation Fund and the Ontario Youth Entrepreneurship Fund) to get their entrepreneurship dreams started.

Implement a Skills-Focused Promotion Strategy for Investment

• We need to do a better job promoting the skills that are available in Ottawa to international investors.

• How many graduates do we produce and in what? What are the commercial costs, etc. An innovation economy attracts investment through the cluster of skills that it has available.

• Right now, we promote our businesses, not the skills that we have to offer as a city.

• I would “Double-Down” on Invest Ottawa and expand its promotion to focus on skills that we offer as a community, not just the businesses we already have.

• Through a commitment to Open Data, we will provide potential investors the hard numbers they need to choose Ottawa as a hotspot for their investment. We will work with Invest Ottawa, provincial and federal governments and our post-secondary institutions to provide accurate, up-to-date data about the skills we have to offer here in the Ottawa valley.

Promote the Values and Skills that Young Canadians Can Offer

• Considering the stigma attached to young workers, the city will also need to undertake promotional campaigns to highlight the unique talents and skills that young workers bring to the table along with their strong work ethic.

• The city will need to take a leadership role in hosting networking opportunities where young Canadians get the opportunity to connect with future employers and investors.

Establish the City of Ottawa as the Central Hub for Employment

• The City of Ottawa can also use its position as a central hub of commerce to connect businesses with prospective employees.

• While the City has had success in investing in networking opportunities between industry, commerce and prospective employees, the City also needs to continue the development of its social networks.

• By leveraging the City’s position as the epicentre of commerce on social networks, young workers would have a singular location that they could start with to build their online networks.

• The City can expand their job search programs while integrating them with the region’s post-secondary programs and local market and labour needs.

• The City is responsible for the tail-end of welfare, we need to work harder so that people never get to that point.

Working towards Labour Market Freedom through Open Data

• We need to work closer with post-secondary institutional, provincial and federal governments, and local employers to better match the education and training that our institutions provide with the market needs of our local economy.

• To accomplish this goal, we need better information. In line with Don Drummond’s recommendation in the IRPP study Wanted: Good Canadian Labour Market Information, we will lobby the federal and provincial governments to work together and develop an integrated Labour Market Information System so that the City, our post-secondary institutions and our citizens can get the information they need so that we can match the skills we have with the opportunities we have available.

Working towards Labour Market Freedom through Open Data

• If this effort is unsuccessful, then the City will need take on a greater leadership role in collecting, storing and sharing aggregate labour market data with the greater community.

• While this information is needed by our businesses, it is essential for our future employees as they have to make major decisions about their career in a very short period of time.

• They need that information today. Through the City’s commitment to Open Data, we can provide prospective and current students with more detailed information about the local economy, job market and the success or failure of recent graduates in finding work, so that they can make fully-informed decisions regarding their education.

Working towards Labour Market Freedom through Open Data

• Our goal is not be to guarantee anyone a career. Our goal is to give everyone the information they need to make their own decisions.

• Only through a well-informed community can we ensure true labour market freedom: where our skills are matched with our opportunities to build stable and valued careers.

We Can Do It

• Dealing with the challenge of youth unemployment will not be easy. There is no magic bullet. It will require hard work, collaboration and investment to bring out the best in our next generation. By working together, we can create a city where everyone gets a fair chance.

Scott Blurton for Capital Ward

ScottBlurton@ScottBlurton.ca

@ScottGBlurtonScottBlurtonForCapitalWard@ScottGBlurton

www.scottblurton.ca