Noah D. Arney

Tag: career development

  • Youth Unemployment Issues

    A reminder that I love StatsCan data (yes, I’m a nerd). Well I was looking at unemployment and labour market participation over the last decades (1990-2022) averaged yearly and broken out by 15-64 and 15-24 groups in both Canada as a whole and just BC. I was hoping to see if BC was an outlier anywhere and we really aren’t. But I found something else very interesting.

    Three types of data tell us what’s going on: 1) unemployment rate (how many people in the workforce aren’t employed) 2) participation rate (how many people are in the workforce who could be) and 3) the difference between youth and all unemployment and participation.

    This gives us info like knowing that generally high unemployment aligns well with low labour market participation because people will self-select out of the labour market when it’s bad. We also see the shift over the 90s as more people under 24 are in post-secondary showing a substantial decline in their labour market participation but not a massive raise in unemployment (because they’re not unemployed, they’re in university. This info also tells us that the unemployment rate changing for youth but not for the whole labour market is an impact that only hits youth.

    So what happened during those 32 years? Well 1997-2004 was a bad time to be a youth looking for work. Youth labour market participation was going back up after the dip in the early 90s but the jobs weren’t there. Overall unemployment was fine, but if you were under 24 you were having a hard time. Then the strangeness that led me to writing this, 2005.

    Suddenly youth unemployment across the country drops. It’s a small blip in Canada, but in BC it’s massive. Youth unemployment in BC goes from a high of 15% in 2002 to a slow drop to 13.5% in 2004, that’s normal. But in 2005 it’s 10% and by 2007 it’s at its lowest in the entire data set at 7.7%. It’s so sudden and impactful, and localized to only BC it must have some cause, but I don’t know what it is, and I was in that age range at the time. I remember a lot of help wanted signs, and I remember that for the first time in my adult life I could easily get a summer job or part time job.

    This should have been fantastic, but the 2008 financial crash and oil price crash ended it. Unemployment for youth shoots right back up to 13% by 2009. The 2009 issue is clear, but what caused the drop in the first place? It was noticeable that youth in BC rejoined the labour market because of it. And it is very clearly a youth phenomenon because the dip for the all ages unemployment is minor.

    Moving forward from that time though after the recovery from the financial crash the youth unemployment rate starts going down again, slowly this time, hitting 7.7 again in 2018, and then looking to stabilize in 2019 at 9%. I say stabilize because after the shock to the system from COVID it’s back to the 8-9% that seems to be a “normal” youth unemployment rate.

    So what did I learn from the data? Youth participation lags youth unemployment slightly, but more perceptibly than all ages. Perhaps that means that youth are more likely to leave the workforce for school and other reasons if they can’t find work? Also, something happened at the end of 2004 or early 2005 to change youth employment in BC and it was impactful until the 2008 crash.

    Finally I learned that the changes in the economy impact youth first and most. In every increase to total unemployment youth are impacted months before the general unemployment rate. The gap grows every time there’s a crisis and it always takes several months after the general unemployment goes down for the gap to begin shrinking.

  • Humanities Vs Business has more to do with marketing than reality

    As has been the case since before I got my BA in English and Theatre, people remain concerned about the crisis in the humanities and the shift to business instead.

    John Warner has a great post about this over at his blog.

    I wanted to look at something I find interesting with the data though, from a career development standpoint.

    My English degree has been incredibly helpful in all of my roles, and something I’ve, especially when I lived in Calgary, is the number of management people I met who have humanities degrees. It’s really common. So common that it sometimes makes me question why so many universities have a BBAs in Management. Accounting, economics, finance, and supply chain all make sense to me, but Management before the graduate level has always been strange to me.

    Business degrees are often chosen because there is a straight line from degree title to job title and that makes things less worrisome. It’s what I call the “well worn path” method of choosing a post-secondary education program.

    Some quick definitions about what is normally called an Arts or Humanities program in Canada using ISCED info to help align things (PDF here).

    Generally under Arts:

    • 2 Humanities and arts
      • 21 Arts
        • Fine arts: drawing, painting, sculpture;
        • Performing arts: music, drama, dance, circus;
        • Graphic and audio-visual arts: photography, cinematography, music production, radio and television production, printing and publishing;
        • Design; craft skills.
      • 22 Humanities
        • Religion and theology;
        • Foreign languages and cultures: living or ‘dead’ languages and their literature, area studies;
        • Native languages: current or vernacular language and its literature;
        • Other humanities: interpretation and translation, linguistics, comparative literature, history, archaeology, philosophy, ethics.
    • 3 Social sciences, business and law
      • 31 Social and behavioural science
        • Sociology, demography, anthropology (except physical anthropology), ethnology, futurology,
        • Psychology
        • Geography (except physical geography), peace and conflict studies, human rights.
      • 32 Journalism and information
        • Journalism;
        • Library technician and science;
        • Technicians in museums and similar repositories;
        • Documentation techniques;
        • Archival sciences.

    Generally under Business:

    • 3 Social sciences, business and law
      • 31 Social and behavioural science
        • Economics, economic history, political science;
      • 34 Business and administration
        • Retailing, marketing, sales, public relations, real estate;
        • Finance, banking, insurance, investment analysis;
        • Accounting, auditing, bookkeeping;
        • Management, public administration, institutional administration, personnel administration;
        • Secretarial and office work.

    So Arts covers everything from fine arts to sociology while business is more focused. And oddly enough, social sciences, the section that in Canada is considered Arts but internationally is together with business seems to be the one group in Arts that’s bucking the downward trend. There’s a lot of cross over in the social sciences between arts and business, especially as economics tends to show up in both areas. Similarly the blurred line between communications and public relations has caused many a faculty argument in the past. Side note, the ISCED considers Supply Chain Management or Logistics to be part of Management and instead of Human Resources uses the term Personnel Administration. They also put political science and economics together. Instead of separating that I’m just putting both in the Business category.

    To simplify things I’m going to break it down into some common majors in the two fields, and this is a massive oversimplification.

    • Arts
      • Fine & Performing Arts
      • Graphic Arts and Design
      • History and Archaeology
      • Human Geography and related studies
      • Journalism, Publishing, and Media Production
      • Languages, Literature, and Linguistics
      • Library, Museum, and Archival studies
      • Philosophy & Ethics
      • Psychology
      • Sociology, Anthropology, and related studies
      • Theology
    • Business
      • Accounting
      • Business Administration
      • Economics
      • Finance
      • Human Rescources Management
      • Management
      • Marketing
      • Political Science
      • Public Administration
      • Public Relations
      • Retailing and Sales
      • Supply Chain Management

    But with those definitions out of the way lets move on to the NOC and compare the jobs there under business with the various majors. I’m only looking at TEER 1 jobs (generally requires a 4 year degree) as the TEER 0 (management) and TEER 2/3 (1-3 year degree) aren’t usually the ones BA/BBA students are looking at right after graduation.

    With that though suddenly the number of careers in the NOC drops rapidly. For the Arts/Business crowd you’re left with Professional Occupations in Business and Finance (11) and Professional occupations in art and culture (51). It excludes the entirety of Sales and Service occupations (6). In general the included roles under Art and Culture require an arts degree, but there are substantially fewer of them than the roles under Business and Finance. So let’s drill down into the jobs in Business and Finance.

    • Financial auditors and accountants
      • Licensing or certification post business degree in Accounting or Finance
    • Financial and investment analysts
      • Business degree in any major, Economics or Finance preferred
    • Financial advisors
      • Business degree in any major
    • Securities agents, investment dealers and brokers
      • Business degree or any other degree and experience
    • Other financial officers
      • Business degree with additional designations after
    • Human resources professionals
      • Business or social sciences degree
    • Professional occupations in business management consulting
      • Arts, Business, or Social Sciences degree
    • Professional occupations in advertising, marketing and public relations
      • Arts, Business, or Social Sciences degree

    So the TL:DR there is that it is a “well worn path” to have your major be the same thing you’re looking to do in a job, but outside of regulated professions like Accounting and Finance it’s not actually needed.

    Why is this important? I want students who want to work in marketing and communications to stop worrying about whether they should be in a marketing program or a communications program or a journalism program. Similarly I want students interested in HR and Organizational Management to stop worrying about if they should be in an HR program or a Psychology program or a Sociology program. They all work. What matters is who you are, what skills you develop, and how you want to use them.

    It is always easier for students to pick the “well worn path” program. That’s a communications problem that post-secondary hasn’t solved yet, but maybe someday we will.

    Final Note: I didn’t go into the management ones today because, well that has a lot more to do with the organization itself than with the degree. I’ve met a lot of IT managers with a Bachelors degree in English and a two year programing diploma. Because their job is a lot more about writing to non-technical people than it is programming.