Every Graduate In Canada is an Immigrant in their Own Country

"an image showing the effects of high youth
unemployment in canada showing angry
 young people from many fields of work in
front of a wilting maple leaf"

 The gap between education and work in Canada continues to grow. Many people are aware of the challenges immigrants face when trying to break into the Canadian job market, but young people, even those born here, face many of the same hurdles including in-built prejudices by the people hiring them.

A colleague recently told me her son cannot find a cybersecurity job even after finishing his college program in it. I've talked about cybersecurity a fair bit on Dusty World and it's a mess. Academia wanted its pound of flesh and so rebranded computer science courses as cybersecurity specializations and further muddied the water, but cyber is a an applied skill set, like policing, nursing or teaching. You can sit in a cloud and theorize about it as much as you like, but the work of it happens in the real world every day and a Ph.D. in it isn't the same as doing it. Yet requirements for entry level cyber jobs have become absurd with expectations of post-graduate degrees which do little to prepare a young person for the work itself any more than a masters in law would help a police officer work on the streets. This young man did everything right, studying cyber in an applied manner in college to fill a need Canada claims it has, and yet he finds himself out in the cold.

Last night I was at a mining industry event. Someone on our panel suggested that we could resolve the skills shortage by upskilling people local to the mines in Northern Ontario. This has the added benefit of them more likely sticking around because they're already home. They also aren't caught out by life in the north as those in Southern Ontario often are. Someone in the audience pushed back with the story of their son who grew up in Northern Ontario doing all the right things. He answered the call for skills trades and became an apprentice electrician in hopes of working the local mines where money is good and he can stay close to home. His applications to all the mines in the area were summarily ignored. We often hear these skills-gap closing suggestions and they sound great when you're floating on a boat in Toronto harbour, but why isn't a kid in a high-demand skilled trade finding work in an industry that claims to be desperately short of young talent?

Youth unemployment (ages 18-24) remain at
over double what everyone else faces. It was
even worse during COVID.

Canadians are cliquey by nature, even when it comes to their own children. You hear constant bleating from industry about shortages in skilled trades, technology, yet we seem to go out of our way to find a reason not to hire young people.

In the past year I've worked with cybersecurity, manufacturing and mining organizations on engaging students with career possibilities. The promise is a high-demand, good paying job with future readiness baked in, yet when it comes to landing that job the people hiring seem to go out of their way to find reasons not to even acknowledge these applications let alone accept them.

I'd always assumed this was a failure of education, but the problem runs deeper than that. Perhaps it's Canada's colonial history. Do we have an ingrained belief that we don't have to develop talent or provide it with places to grow? Perhaps this is mixed up with our immigration policies as well. Why nurture local talent when you can cherry pick it from other countries? The next time I hear someone lamenting a 'brain drain' to another country I'll laugh. Trying to grow a career in Canada's stoney ground makes it less a brain drain and more of a brain catapult. Other countries aren't stealing our talent, we're rejecting it and they're taking what we throw away.

There is a lot of momentum in Canada right now to build an economy that can function internally without everything going through the US, as it so often has, but we're not going to build that economy unless we resolve our talent supply chain first. And we're not going to resolve that yawning school to work gap unless we not only build the programs to support it, but also change our minds and get out of this colonialist mindset.

Whether it's a gap between post-secondary institutions and employers or some deeper cultural mindset Canadians are prejudiced with, finding work in Canada remains far more difficult than it should be for young people, even if they follow all the advice and spend a lot of money training themselves in the high-demand careers everyone keeps telling them Canada so desperately needs.

The advertising is one thing, the reality another.