JOB TRAINING:
New approach needed
There are three dirty little secrets when it comes to young people and their career choices.
The first is that parents sometimes steer their kids wrong. Not intentionally. After all, they want the best for their children. But some parents give career advice that is ill informed or misguided.
The second is that career education in Canadian schools is patchy and needs improvement, despite some laudable policies from ministries of education, and some exceptional local programs.
The third secret is that too many of the young and jobless have given more thought to what brand of jeans to buy than their career plan. The question is, why?
These statements are provocative, of course.
My apologies to the parents, profes- sionals and struggling young adults who are doing all the right things. This is not about you.
I’ve lobbed a grenade deliberately. If we tiptoe around the shortcomings of career education, it won’t get better.
Here’s a little experiment: write down every different kind of job you can think of. Then, count the number of jobs on your list. Is it dozens? Hundreds? Now consider this: the National Occupation Classification, a federal government publication, describes 923 distinct occupations encompassing 25,000 job titles.
Who can blame parents for not grasping all the possibilities? However, the problem is not what they don’t know.
It is their not realizing what they don’t know, and how that narrows their children’s options.
I met Kanchan “Kenny” Singla, 24, at a job fair in Scarborough. She was a newcomer to Canada with a master’s in science and information technology from Punjab Technical University. She hadn’t turned up any job prospects in Toronto after months of looking.