'The millennial side hustle,' not stable job, is the new reality for university grads

[Masark]

Oh, so it's like an apprenticeship that you pay for.

Not quite. In my program, it was 8 months class, then 4 months work, 4 classroom, then alternate til done. Total of 20 months classroom and 12 months work). And you are paid for your work terms. Even my worst paid workterm more than paid for my tuition and the rent during the work term. I would have needed some loans for expenses during class semesters if my parents didn't have an RESP, but that would only have amounted to 10k or so.

[Macaquerie]

That has long been the attitude in the western world. That a college degree makes you a higher class citizen than others, and that you can safely look down on the "uneducated".

You have this backwards - the university system was set up to satiate the idle intellectual pursuits of the upper class. The term "liberal arts" doesn't imply any sort of political leaning but rather that you had to be "free" of any obligation to work in order to study them, since they were not intended to be useful job skills. At the heart of it, it's not lack of education that people look down on but rather the need to do work at all, especially the kind of dirty, physical labor that has always been a sign of low status and scoffed at by the upper classes. And to some extent that logic still holds today, you can probably make a better living as a plumber or truck driver than you would doing random office work, but plenty of people avoid it just because working with your hands implies a degree of crudeness and lack of sophistication.

[bigbleach]

There's usually a reason kids aren't taking internships in undergraduate school, usually because they can't afford unpaid internships or moving in order to take the internship or because internships in certain fields are overwhelmingly competitive.

I think it's funny that everyone in this article is shitting on the kid for not having experience, because the same problem that exists with job offers after graduation also exists with getting internships and co-ops in the first place. They are far more competitive now than they were a decade ago.

http://www.bbc.com/news/business-22818555

The way people treat each other blows me away lol. If the kid was complaining about not being able to find a job that pays more because he lacks education, they would be swarming him telling him to go to college and get an education. But he did in fact go and got something lol. Now everyone is telling him he got a useless degree and bleh bleh bleh should have done x because its your fault you were lazy and wanted to learn a trade that you wanted to learn, how dare you! And then lol.. Go get an unpaid internship lol. Hey man, go get one! Go work for free! I mean you don't have bills or anything, you have already gone and done what they told you your whole life to do! One more thing so we can add another thing on it and attack you further.

You people kill me

[Klingers]

Ah, unpaid internships. Just another one of those wonderful gifts from baby boomers that had it a lot easier that they can throw in our face and call us "lazy" for not embracing with gusto.

[primalmatter]

The point is that prices would rise automatically to accommodate the new production cost but wages can't follow suit, because the profits are shrunk to a far lower level, and there is still a need to maintain at least 15-20 % direct investment payoff (that is about the lowest you can go, without breaking the market), hence the leverage to demand higher wages disappears. And that is smaller business's, large corporations is a whole other ordeal when it comes to chain store dynamics.

So prices would rise, but wages wouldn't. It is the luxury of the western world that we currently have, and abandoning that is of course a completely other discussion but it is far from a solution to our current problems of wealth inequality and the shrinking of the middle class.

I am making the argument that we need to abondon it at least to a degree. Eventually our reliance on slave labor will come full circle. I hear the argument that automation may off set this but I feel people put to much stock into given the costs to maintain and construct it.

[Celista]

The way people treat each other blows me away lol. If the kid was complaining about not being able to find a job that pays more because he lacks education, they would be swarming him telling him to go to college and get an education. But he did in fact go and got something lol. Now everyone is telling him he got a useless degree and bleh bleh bleh should have done x because its your fault you were lazy and wanted to learn a trade that you wanted to learn, how dare you! And then lol.. Go get an unpaid internship lol. Hey man, go get one! Go work for free! I mean you don't have bills or anything, you have already gone and done what they told you your whole life to do! One more thing so we can add another thing on it and attack you further.

You people kill me

Yeah, I don't understand why some people's knee-jerk response is to blame the person instead of at least acknowledging that macroscopic factors might be influencing his job search success.

[Kathandira]

I wonder if this is what helped get Trump elected, people who graduate with a four year degree but feel their job prospects aren't good? Globalization is what is making job hunting difficult as middle class jobs move over seas, Trump ran as anti-globalization I wonder how many millennials voted for Trump?







Much more to read at link

http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/mill...tion-1.4009295

Twenty-one-year old Christian McCrave feels like he did his part.

He got good grades in high school and completed a four-year degree at the University of Guelph in southwestern Ontario. He studied mechanical engineering, in part because he thought it would land him a job.

It hasn't.

"I actually thought that coming out of school that I would be a commodity and someone would want me," McCrave said. "But instead, I got hit with a wall of being not wanted whatsoever in the industry."

McCrave says he believed in the unwritten promise of a post-secondary education: work hard at school, and you'll end up with a good and stable job.

Now, he's not so sure.

"Being unemployed while having a degree is kind of a kick in the face," McCrave said. "If anything, it's a setback. You have all this debt and this degree, and everyone has one, but it doesn't get you further in life sometimes."

Since graduating last year, McCrave has applied for 250 engineering jobs, but he's only had four interviews and no job offer.

McCrave isn't alone. More than 12 per cent of Canadians between the ages of 15 and 24 are unemployed and more than a quarter are underemployed, meaning they have degrees but end up in jobs that don't require them.

The latest numbers from Statistics Canada show that the unemployment rate for 15-to-24-year-olds is almost twice that of the general population.

McCrave has expanded his job search to include retail and recently applied to work at the local Sobey's grocery store near his parents house in London, Ont., where he has lived since soon after graduation.

"It's a job. Something to feel accomplished from," said McCrave. "As much as an engineer can be accomplished by cutting deli meats."

Co-ops, apprenticeships key to employability

The challenge McCrave faces is experience: namely, he doesn't have any. The most recent work experience on his resume is sales associate at Winners.

Sandro Perruzza, the chief executive officer at the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers (OSPE), is familiar with graduates like McCrave.

Christian McCrave 2
Since graduating, McCrave has applied for 250 engineering jobs but hasn't had a single offer, he says. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC )

"He could have applied for co-ops or apprenticeships while he was at school — even if it delayed his graduation," Perruzza said. "We strongly advocate co-ops. The fact is because of the sheer number of applicants these days, the ones who get the jobs have some kind of experience."

Should McCrave land one of the retail jobs he's applied for, he'll achieve one of the hallmarks of his generation: underemployment.

'With millennials, the idea is that we are lazy and that we don't work hard and stuff is given to us.'
- Christian McCrave, 21, engineering graduate
A 2014 Canadian Teachers' Federation report found nearly a quarter of Canada's youth are either unemployed, working less than they want or have given up looking for work entirely.

The number of engineers in Ontario who are underemployed is 33 per cent, according to the OSPE.

Still, McCrave says he often hears it's his own fault that he's unemployed.

"With millennials, the idea is that we are lazy and that we don't work hard and stuff is given to us — the idea of the participation award," McCrave said. "We didn't want the participation award. We didn't want to be told we are not good enough but here's an award anyways. We want to compete; we want to succeed."

'The millennial side hustle'

Fast forward a few years in the job trajectory of the millennial generation, and you'll find Clair Parker. Parker, 26, has a political science degree from Carleton University in Ottawa and a certificate in public relations from Humber College in Toronto.

"I live in an apartment, I have three roommates, and I don't have benefits," said Parker. "If I were the exception, I would feel upset about that because I would feel that I had done something wrong, but I am not the exception. I am the norm."

Clair Parker
Clair Parker might not be making direct use of her political science degree at her job as a bartender at a small Toronto brewery, but don't call her underemployed. 'It implies just the [job] title means more than what is going on in the workplace,' she says. (Nick Purdon/CBC)

Parker's bartending job doesn't pay enough to make ends meet so she cobbles together enough money to live in Toronto by also working at a yoga studio and house sitting.

"I joke with my friends all the time about the millennial side hustle," Parker says. "We all have different side hustles that we do to get money. So many people who would have worked in-house for a company before are freelancing now."

The millennial side hustle (also known as the gig economy) means no steady job but also no safety net.

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"If you have a toothache now and you are 24 years old, you freak out," says Parker. "That's going to be a couple of grand when you go to the dentist for the first time. I think people are going to feel really disenfranchised by the workforce and uncared for by the workforce."

Parker works primarily at Halo brewery in Toronto, bartending and doing whatever else is needed to keep the small business running.

Kimberly Ellis-Hale again
'Being precariously employed takes its toll,' says Ellis-Hale. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC)

"On paper, I am a bartender," Parker says. "But anyone who has worked with a small business understands that it's kind of an all hands on deck situation. You have a lot of opportunities to learn a lot of different things."

Parker bristles at the suggestion that she is underemployed.

"I am not underemployed, and I kind of get offended when people say I am underemployed," Parker says. "It implies that they know more about my situation than I know about my situation. It implies just the [job] title means more than what is going on in the workplace. It's a huge assumption."

While Parker probably could have gotten her job without five years of post-secondary education, she says her education will allow her to grow along with the business. She is banking on potential — her own and the company's.

The university enrolment boom

The promise of higher education is alive and well in Canada. There are more university students than ever before. In 2015, there were more than two million students enrolled at Canadian universities and colleges, compared to almost 800,000 in 1980.

Kimberly Ellis-Hale 1
Kimberly Ellis-Hale has been teaching at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., since 1998 but still has to re-apply for her job every four months. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC)

"With a good education, you will have a good future. With a good education, you will have a good job," said Kimberly Ellis-Hale, an instructor at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., who teaches sociology and other subjects. "And I think for past generations, it may have been [the case]. I think for future generations, it's not a guarantee."

Even though economic indicators that track employment reveal a trend toward more precarious jobs, Ellis-Hale says most of her students don't see that as their future. She didn't either, but that's how things turned out.

'I teach in a place that sells education as the path to a better and more secure life, and I don't have a part of that life.'
- Kimberly Ellis-Hale, contract faculty, Wilfrid Laurier University
Ellis-Hale is contract faculty, and even though she's been teaching university courses at Laurier since 1998, she has to re-apply for her job every four months.

"I have very little job security," Ellis-Hale said. "And being precariously employed takes its toll."

Ellis-Hale's two children are now grown up and live on their own, but she vividly remembers standing in the pharmacy when they were young trying to decide which child needed antibiotics the most.

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"I couldn't afford to purchase both of them," Ellis-Hale says. "And how do you live with that? I teach in a university. I teach in a place that sells education as the path to a better and more secure life, and I don't have a part of that life."

Turning the promise into a guarantee

The University of Regina's UR Guarantee program, launched in 2009, turns the unwritten promise of post-secondary education into an actual guarantee. If a student enrolled in the program doesn't get a full-time job in their field within six months of graduation, they can return for a year of undergraduate study tuition-free.

"The reason we do this is we know that if students do all the things that are part of the program, they are going to be successful," said Naomi Deren, associate director of student success at the university.

Naomi Deren
Noami Deren is the associate director of student success at the University of Regina and runs the school's UR Guarantee program, which lets graduates return for a free year of study if they don't get a job in their field within six months. (Leonardo Palleja/CBC)

Students from any department can enrol in the program and must complete career development training, including resume reviews and job interview seminars.

In their final year, students are required to network and complete a labour market overview in their chosen field. Their job search begins while they are still at school.

'The average student doesn't … do that preparation, isn't thinking about their career in second year and is sort of left scrambling at the end of it.'
-Naomi Deren, associate director of student success, University of Regina
"I really think that the average student doesn't do all of that stuff, doesn't do that preparation, isn't thinking about their career in second year and is sort of left scrambling at the end of it," Deren said.

Of the 120 students who have participated in the program only two have come back for the free year.

"Honestly, everyone else has found what they were looking for," Deren said. "We have students who are teaching — they got full time contracts right out of university … We have students who are working in marketing, communications. We have a reporter for the Leader Post."

From what ive learned over the years, is you to set yourself apart from other candidates. A degree isn't enough, you need personal accomplishments. It is also very helpful to diversify your skills. Just being an engineer is one thing, but paired with Business Management, and you are much more attractive.

I took Networking and Security, which was a great help, but my 7 years of professional customer service is what got me where I am. I combined my hardskills and soft skills and made myself very valuable.

Don't be just another whatever, find a way to stand out.

[Deleted]

I am making the argument that we need to abondon it at least to a degree. Eventually our reliance on slave labor will come full circle. I hear the argument that automation may off set this but I feel people put to much stock into given the costs to maintain and construct it.

I am not saying that you are wrong, I am saying that more is needed to solve the situation. That has been my point the entire time that abandoning it isn't an end all solution, and that without the proper means it is going to hurt about as much.
As for automation that is my expertise since I worked with and managed robotics marketing, construction and counseling, and I can tell you that most industrial robots can work for cents comparative to a worker. The only barrier is initial cost, and that isn't so much an issue anymore as it once was. Most robots will have paid themselves in under a year, and after that it is a massive net gain in profits.