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Youth need more in-person contact, less time online to find work

Dec 21, 2016 | 1:44 PM

OTTAWA – A new report from the federal government’s expert panel on youth employment points to a need to move away from digital services for young, first-time job seekers and instead offer more person-to-person contacts and services.

In an interim report released today, the panel describes how young people complete hundreds of online job applications without receiving any response from employers and that the reliance on using personal networks to find jobs is unreasonably high.

The report says that young people with the most success at landing a job do so through the people they know and for those without such a network, the necessity to build connections can be overly intimidating.

The panel’s report also found young Canadians have high levels of anxiety about their future work prospects, even those with post-secondary education and previous job experience two keys frequently cited as an avenue to a good job.

A Statistics Canada study released earlier this month showed that young people have seen their job quality decline over 40 years, even as the youth unemployment rate has remained relatively unchanged.

In both 1976 and 2015 it was 2.3 times higher than the rate among those aged 25 and older.