TWIG Highlights
The Toronto Workforce Innovation Group is releasing the Toronto's Opportunities and Priorities (TOP)- Local Labour Market Update 2012, in this edition of On Topic. This year's report highlights four employment clusters; food production, hospitality and tourism, non-for-profit, professional, scientfic and technical services. These are four prominent clusters or sectors in Toronto's economy. The report includes descriptions of key workforce development challenges.
Seeing the Bigger Picture: Understanding Labour Market Information - the 4th and last session in this series will be held on April 17th, at City Hall, Committee Room 4, at 9. Speakers include Matt Wood and Justine Katz on the Green Skills Network, Susan McLachlan who will speak about Food Production and Karen Lior from TWIG, who will speak about this year's TOP report. For more information please contact info@workforceinnovation.ca
The Daily Statistics Canada
April 5, 2012
Following four months of little change, employment in Ontario increased by 46,000. Job gains were all in full-time work. The unemployment rate in the province declined 0.2 percentage points to 7.4%, its lowest level in three years. With this month's gain, employment in Ontario was up 1.3% (+89,000) since March 2011.
City of Toronto
April 5, 2012
The seasonally adjusted monthly unemployment rate for City of Toronto residents fell from 9.4% in February to 8.8% in March 2012. The participation rate increased from 64.6% in February to 65.2% in March 2012. On a seasonally adjusted monthly basis, the number of employed City of Toronto residents increased by 18,000 in March, bringing employment to the same level a year ago. The employment rate of City residents aged 15+ years that are employed increased from 58.5% in February 2012 to 59.5% in March 2012, on a seasonally adjusted monthly basis.
Toronto Immigrant Employment Data Initiative
April 5, 2012
A comparison of the Toronto CMA labour market in March 2011 and March 2012 shows that immigrants gained 51,500 jobs while Canadian-born lost 71,800 jobs. Employment for immigrants increased both in the service-producing sector (50,600 jobs) and in the goods-producing sector (900 jobs). For immigrants, notable job gains were recorded in accommodation and food services (24,700 jobs) and in finance, insurance, real estate and leasing (20,100 jobs). Large job losses for immigrants were recorded in information, culture and recreation (19,800 jobs) as well as manufacturing (8,500 jobs).
-Participation rate of 25-54 year old Toronto CMA immigrants (25-54 years): 81.2%
-Full-time employment rate of Toronto CMA immigrants: 87.8%
-Unemployment rate of Toronto CMA immigrants: 7.6%
Globe and Mail
Tavia Grant
April 10, 2012
A fault line is splintering Canada’s labour market into those who can’t find work and those who can’t find workers.The imbalance has implications for both the health of the labour market and the broader economy. Groups with high jobless rates such as aboriginal people, recent immigrants and those with disabilities are struggling to land good jobs, limiting their ability to climb the economic ladder.The Canadian Chamber of Commerce cites a shortage of highly skilled labour as the top barrier for businesses. Structural shifts in the labour market mean “workers in declining industries may not have the skills or experience to match immediately the needs of employers in expanding industries,” indicates central bank Governor Mark Carney.The disconnect isn’t just a problem in Canada. It’s materializing throughout advanced economies. And this “disequilibrium” in many national labour markets will only be resolved through new approaches. Improving skills and workplace training should become a national priority, and recommended more companies make a “strategic decision to take a direct role in creating the skilled workforces and talent pipelines they need.”
Globe and Mail
Tavia Grant
March 25, 2012
Employment levels may be drifting sideways, but that doesn’t mean the labour market is staying still. The economy and employment – remain a top concern among Canadians. Here, then, are five key trends in the labour market, based on the most recent Statistics Canada’s payroll employment, earnings and hours survey data:
A country of clerks
The retail sector is the single largest employer in Canada, with 1.9 million workers. That translates into one in every eight workers. Health care and social assistance, and manufacturing, are the country’s next top employers.
The move to mining
No other sector has added more jobs in the past year, percentage-wise, than natural resources. Employment has risen 7.7 per cent in mining, quarrying and oil-and-gas extraction sector, mirroring the boom in the industry. Even with the gains, factories still employ seven times as many people.
Where jobs are lost
The biggest percentage drops in the past year have been in the real estate, rental and leasing area. Education has also shed jobs, along with information and cultural industries.
By province
Alberta has seen the biggest payrolls gains, followed by Saskatchewan. The Maritime provinces have lost jobs in the past year.
Paycheques
Average weekly earnings among payroll employees were 2.4 per cent higher than a year ago, two points below the current rate of inflation. On average, workers earned $888.26 a week.
Immigrants
Maytree Foundation
April 2012
Each year, Canada receives 250,000 newcomers, most with high levels of education and international work experience, and many who are underutilized in the Canadian labour market. In small businesses, these skilled immigrants can boost innovation by contributing
new ideas, perspectives and approaches, speaking languages in addition to English or French, providing insight into diverse domestic markets and by helping SMEs do business in the global marketplace. A report by Maytree Foundation summarizes the findings of a year-long study of promising, new or innovative initiatives that can help connect SMEs with the skilled immigrant labour pool.
Youth
Canadian Business Online
Armine Yalnizyan
April 4, 2012
Over half of all the jobs that were lost between October 2008 and July 2009 were held by Canadians under 25. Since then, the number of job holders has surpassed the pre-recession level by 1%, but not among young people. There are 25,000 fewer of them working paid jobs today than in July 2009. 414,000 young adults were looking for work and there is always more unemployment among youth than in the rest of the labour force. They're still figuring out how to sell themselves to prospective employers, and are likelier than others to leave a job in search of a better one. But at 14.7%, the unemployment rate for those under 25 is now double the national rate.
Education
Financial Post
Christine Dobby
April 4, 2012
The headlines must seem grim to new grads looking to have a career in Toronto’s financial services market. Banks and brokerages around the world around the world have announced thousands of job cuts. Yet, the employment outlook on Bay Street could almost be characterized as rosy. That’s due in part to the strength of the Canadian banking sector but also to opportunities in new or newly important sectors like risk or wealth management. “There’s always people who struggle, but I think the reality is that overall, the financial markets in Toronto are quite strong,” says the executive director of the Career Development Centre at the Schulich School of Business. “We’re seeing more risk management hiring for obvious reasons, and more internal consulting,” he says of post-crisis recruitment trends. Employment in Toronto’s financial services industry, which includes jobs in banking, insurance and investment management totalled 222,380 in 2011, according to Statistics Canada data and the city’s economic development division.
Other News
Globe and Mail
Richard Blacwell
March 28, 2012
It’s crucial for cities to nurture their industry “clusters” – concentrations of businesses that collaborate, compete and feed off each other.
Why are clusters important?
Economies need higher levels of productivity, and higher levels of innovation. Both come from understanding and responding to market signals better and faster, with more insights. The companies are tuned to market opportunities, ways to get an advantage and signs of potential innovations. If clustered together, they have clear and better access to those market signals.
How important is having strong educational institutions turning out the right kind of graduate?
That is very important. There are flagship universities that produce the PhDs and the applied research. But the other universities, and community colleges, where the journeyman engineers and technicians come from, are all key to this. A lot of clusters actually sponsor training programs at community colleges. They pay to put in place a curriculum and everybody wins. The community college has their bills paid, the companies have people trained exactly for what they need and the people looking for employment have jobs delivered on a platter.
Toronto Star
Laurie Monsebraaten
April 8, 2012
If the best route out of poverty is a job, a commission studying Ontario’s welfare system thinks the province can do more to help its most vulnerable residents find work. Part of the problem is that training programs are available only to people receiving employment insurance benefits. And yet, barely half of the province’s jobless, and less than a quarter in Toronto are eligible for EI. As a result, many job-seekers, including more than 550,000 households living on social assistance, are shut out of these programs, the commissioners note. Economist Don Drummond called for an overhaul of provincial employment programs in his recent review of Ontario’s public services. Last month, the City of Toronto unveiled a new workforce development strategy to better link employers to job-seekers.
Resources
Toronto as a Global City: Scorecard on Prosperity 2012
Toronto Board of Trade
March 26, 2012
Toronto as a Global City: Scorecard On Prosperity 2012 benchmarks the Toronto Region against 23 global metropolitan areas, measuring liveability and economic performance. The analysis this year is expanded in two important areas:
- the North American economy to understand the health of metropolitan regions and
- the contributions of leading industry clusters.
The Toronto Region is still a great place to live and work but systemic problems are hampering its position in the global rankings. While Canadian cities weathered the recession and recovered more quickly than U.S. counterparts, this recovery has masked troubling and continuing structural issues. Scorecard data shows the Toronto Region continues to have lower productivity and GDP growth and is losing ground to many U.S. and Canadian cities. The Board of Trade believes a strong economic cluster strategy is a key marker of a region's competitiveness and is vital to the Toronto Region's continued success.
McKinsey Global Institute
James Manyika, Susand Lund, Byron Auguste and Sreenivas Ramaswamy
March 2012
Some 40 million workers across advanced economies are unemployed. With many nations still facing weak demand—and the risk of renewed recession—hiring has been restrained. Yet there are also long-range forces at play that will make it more difficult for advanced economies to return to pre-recession levels of employment in the years to come. As a result, the current disequilibrium in many national labor markets will not be solved solely with measures that worked well in decades past.
To help develop appropriate new responses, MGI examines five trends that are influencing employment levels and shaping how work is done and jobs are created:
1. Technology and the changing nature of work
2. Skill mismatches
3. Geographic mismatches
4. Untapped talent
5. Disparity in income growth
The report offers some thoughts about what policy makers and business leaders in advanced economies might do to address these trends, and offers examples for each.