A new study shows Ontario post-secondary students are struggling to find employment that provides them with valuable career experience.
In June 2014, the Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) published “We Work Hard for Our Money” as a portion of their 2014 “What Students Want” report series.
The study analyzes the results of the OUSA’s bienniel survey, which gathered data from six Ontario universities.
It revealed that students who elected to work during both the summer and academic year were having a difficult time finding positions that provide them with valuable career experience.
But student employment rates during the summer of 2013 were high—74 per cent of post-secondary students were employed. Yet only about one third of employed undergraduates were successful in finding positions related to their field of study.
The report found science, technology, engineering, and mathematics students had the easiest time finding study-related work, while students in humanities and social sciences had a much more difficult time doing so.
“Students in the Humanities and Social Sciences are among the least likely students to have opportunities to engage in high-impact learning, such as co-op, undergraduate research opportunities, paid internships, etc.,” said Richard Camman, Vice President of Administration and Human Resources at OUSA in an email.
“Following the recession, employers have increasingly scaled back on-the-job training for new employees and recent grads and are now expecting recent graduates to not only have the highly transferrable soft skills that had traditionally typified a university education, but also the hard industry-specific skills that are more common in the colleges and trades,” Camman said.
Camman also mentions a significant decrease in what the report calls “in-study employment.”
“In 2011, 41 per cent of students worked in-study, whereas only 37 per cent of students did so in 2013,” Camman said.
Camman said the cancellation of the Ontario work study program in 2012, which provided universities with funding for on-campus paid positions during the school year, was a possible explanation for the decrease in in-study employment.
Camman said he is calling on the provincial and federal governments to lend a hand to students.
“OUSA would like to see the government reinvest in the recently cancelled work study program with certain funding dedicated to needs-based access to employment opportunities as they allow for students to gain relevant work experience related to their field of study,” he said.
