Monthly Archives: September 2015
Working with New Immigrants: Tips for Career Professionals
In 2014, Canada welcomed over 250,000 new immigrants, and these new residents offer career professionals a market with widely varying career management needs. Many of these newcomers will come from countries where a job search is vastly different to that in Canada. For example, India where it is the norm to include the employment status …
On-The-Job Training: The Solution To The Skills Shortage
As the economy begins to slowly bounces back, employers are struggling to fill open positions. But it isn’t because there are fewer workers looking for employment – it’s because those workers seeking jobs don’t necessarily have the right skills. According to a new CareerBuilder.ca survey, half of employers feel there is a shortage of skilled …
De Niro comes of age in The Intern: How older employees are re-inventing themselves
In the movie, The Intern, seventy something Robert De Niro becomes an intern at a company run by thirty something entrepreneur Anne Hathaway. Hilarity ensues. The situation is played brilliantly for laughs, but there’s nothing funny about the generation of boomers pioneering a new phase of life. We are in the midst of a talent …
Informational Interviews: A valuable networking tool for career transitions
When a client starts experiencing increasingly demanding employer expectations, the decision to leave may seem like a rational choice. A career change can fuel one’s passion, maintain work-life balance, and enable a client to get off the beaten path. But wait. A quick move may not prove to be the best option. Remind your client to …
Boomerangers are making a comeback in the workplace
After a couple of years working in customer support at Calgary-based software provider Replicon Inc., Scott Bales was given an opportunity to put his background in programming to good use for a new role in product development. “I moved into that role and realized pretty quickly that it was not something I wanted to do,” …
Improving the Discourse on Skills and Education
Recently, I did a fascinating set of roundtable discussions with employers and employer associations, and it brought home to me how one-dimensional much of our talk is regarding skills. Broadly speaking, there are four sets of skills employers care about. The first are job- or occupation-related skills: can a mechanic actually fix a car? Can …
Unionized construction workplaces have lower rates of lost-time injury claims, but higher rates of total claims, finds new Ontario study
Workers at unionized construction workplaces in Ontario are more likely than their non-unionized counterparts to file job-related injury claims, but less likely to file injury claims that result in time off work. That’s one of the findings of a new, groundbreaking study that set out to probe whether unionized construction companies experience fewer workplace injuries …
Adjusting the Career Counseling Process for Individuals with Non-Apparent Disabilities
As the number of individuals in the United States with disabilities, currently ~50 million, continues to grow (Brault, 2012), the population of people with non-apparent disabilities – issues that are not necessarily visible to others – is also expected to expand. While any person living with a disability may be subject to social stigmas, including …