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For those who watch from afar – policy-makers, politicians, parents – the calculus of risk and reward attending the efforts of young workers has shifted significantly in the past twenty years. The rewards for success – stable, highly-paid and intellectually-fulfilling work – seem greater than before but far less certain. The alternatives to such success for the unlucky, and for those unable or unwilling to compete for positions in the labour market elite, have become less certain. No longer does a strong back and a will to work guarantee steady employment. "Uncertainty" is now a constant.

What must a young person do to succeed? To be sure, education is necessary for labour market success but it clearly is not sufficient. Where once a university degree virtually guaranteed a steady, middle-class income, we can now point to a large number of unemployed or underemployed graduates. Where once high school drop-outs might have found steady unskilled work in factories, in mines or on the ocean, they now must work – if they can find work at all – in low-paid, high-turnover service sector jobs. Young people have always faced the formidable challenge of discovering their capabilities and skills. Now they must also guess at which skills might remain in demand by future employers.

Symptomatic of the increased uncertainty facing young workers is the misnamed "school-to-work transition." In some imaginary or long-since vanished labour market, Canadians went to school until they stopped and, upon stopping, took up full-time work. In today's labour market, many students work and many workers study, so that the line between school and work has become quite blurred.

Is there cause for serious concern about changes in the operation of the youth labour market? To be sure, the job market for young people has long been "worse" than it is for adults: labour force participation rates are lower and unemployment rates are higher. At any point in time, a smaller proportion of young people are working or looking for work because some are in school or raising young children. And those who are in the labour market are more likely to be unemployed, since some will be moving from job to job, hoping to find one that is both steady and satisfying.

Using data from Statistics Canada, Betcherman and Leckie¹ have documented that the youth labour force participation rate, which fell dramatically during the last recession, has been continuing to decline during the current recovery. And, while the gap between the unemployment rates for youth and adults widened during the recession (as would be expected), that gap has failed to close in the post-recession period. While their conclusion that the economic recovery of the 1990s seems to have bypassed youth may, perhaps, be too strong,² there is reason to be concerned by these trends. In particular, the industrial pattern of the jobs held by young people has also changed, so that an increased concentration of youth is evident in industries such as retail trade and personal services that are often characterised by relatively low wages, poor benefit coverage, a high incidence of contingent work, and many part-time jobs.

If we look beyond the more standard labour market indicators, we get some glimpses of two relatively new features of youth labour markets – the increased volatility of employment and increased underemployment.

Part of the uncertainty of employment might be captured by looking at the volatility of earnings for young people. If uncertainty is increasing, we should see young people moving from job to job and from higher-paying to lower-paying jobs, and back. We might also see individuals moving into and out of the labour force, or initially working part time and then full time. These so-called "labour force dynamics" are difficult to analyse in Canada because of the lack of time series labour force data. It is difficult to know if young people now hold more jobs of shorter duration, or if workers are cycling between "good jobs" and "bad jobs", or if periods of unemployment are more or less common unless we are able to systematically "watch" the careers of a group of Canadians unfold. Nonetheless, both longitudinal tax data and the National Graduate Survey can be used to shed some light on the extent to which the working lives of young people have become more uncertain.³

Anecdotes about underemployment are quite common. While we have all heard stories of Ph.D.'s driving taxis and English majors tending bar, actually measuring the extent of underemployment, and judging whether it has increased or decreased in recent years, is quite difficult. For every welder driving a truck, there is an accountant working as a middle-level manager; for every Arts major waiting tables, there is a Social Science major turned construction contractor. "Underemployment" is clearly quite subjective. Much more work remains to be done in this area.

An examination of the youth labour market helps us to understand the intellectual motivation for the youth initiatives mounted by governments. The "school-to-work transition" has been the focus of a number of HRDC programs over the past two decades. However, the increase in involuntary part-time work among youth and the fall in their labour force participation suggests that the problem remains. Similarly, the greater importance of high school graduation might justify efforts such as the Stay-in-School Initiative.

In view of the increasing policy interest in how to design more effective ways of assisting young people prepare for, find and retain employment, this paper tries to summarise "lessons learned" based on the evaluation studies of former and current programs. Knowing what has been tried and what has worked before, and for whom, may help in designing future interventions. In examining program effectiveness, our principal interest is employment-related impacts. In some cases, programs have been successful in producing intermediate outcomes, such as higher educational attainment or a reduction in anti-social behaviour (e.g., involvement in criminal activity). However, the main focus here is on whether programs produce positive results in terms of labour market outcomes – mainly increases in employment and earnings.

The education and training programs discussed here are aimed at young workers. But the employment success of such workers is also affected by other important factors. First, these programs operate on the "supply side" of the market, while the employment of young people is also clearly affected by what is happening on the demand side and by other government policies with other objectives (including deficit reduction and price stability) that may dampen the overall level of economic activity. Perhaps by the middle of the next decade, as today's young people settle into jobs once occupied by baby-boomers, they will enjoy the fruits of such policies. But, like so much of the lives of young people today, these longer-run benefits look uncertain.

Second, an increasing body of evidence suggests that early intervention – as early as the pre-school period – can prevent the occurrence of later problems. In Canada, that evidence is most closely associated with the work of the McMaster University psychiatrist Dan Offord. The problems that we try to solve in the "repair shop" of education and training programs may actually originate at very early ages and may be more fruitfully addressed at that time.

As a final caveat, the original papers prepared for HRDC included information extracted from evaluation literature from other countries. It needs to be kept in mind that, although international experience may provide some useful pointers for Canadian programs, economic, social, cultural and other differences between countries may mean that the lessons are not readily transferable.

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Footnotes

1	Gordon Betcherman and Norm Leckie, Human Resource Group, Ekos research Associates, for the paper Profile of the Youth Labour Market.
2	The reasons for the continuing decline in the youth participation rate are not clear -- some people may be choosing to leave the labour market to go to school full time or to raise families. Moreover, the youth unemployment rate has declined in the post-recessionary period, it has just not declined as much as might have been expected based on the experience of the past.
3	Ross Finnie of Statistics Canada and the School of Public Administration at Carleton University is engaged in on-going work in these areas using these data sources. We thank him for pointing out the potential usefulness of those data sets for studying volatility.