Lost generation

The Lost Generation. They are underemployed. They are overeducated. They are products of a post-secondary educational system that is fragmented and in business to make money. The Lost have a huge financial investment in a future that may never be theirs. They are in debt and many will spend years trying to land a job in their chosen field. Many will upgrade their credentials only find they’ve wasted another year or two and many thousands of dollars in tuition fees and lost wages. They are lost among the nearly 15 per cent of the country’s recent college and university graduates.

I spent about 10 years in the employment business, in the ‘80s and ‘90s. I’m not an expert in labour market trends but I did see a lot of people who were struggling with their job search or job retention. It was our job as employment specialists to ensure a harmonious match between our clients—the potential employees and the employers. At that time we didn’t keep a separate tab on how many recent graduates of postsecondary institutes were unemployed and actively job searching. The technology to track sector statistics was available but, by no means reliable or put to good use. We knew our local labour market, but were in the dark if our worker clients wanted to venture out of the County. To tell the truth, postsecondary graduates (then and now) weren’t exactly the first choice when an employer had a vacancy to fill. Most employers wanted the dreaded combination of work-related skills and years of experience with a generous dollop of a winning personality and perhaps a soupçon of great references. As far as statistics went, college and university graduates just got lumped in with everyone else. When an unemployment rate was published, it covered everyone in the system who was actively job searching. Collectively, they were job seekers eligible to work in this country. Sometimes in a discussion with coworkers about one client or another, we might use the term “underemployed” if, perhaps, an experienced engineer happened to be cleaning vault toilets at a camp park and being paid under the table. As a government institution, we were just starting to use terms to describe generations of people. The silent generation, The G.I. generation, the baby boomers and the generation Xers. Generation Y and the lost generation came after I realized I wanted to be anywhere but at a desk in a government office. Indeed, when push came to shove my children are gen X, gen Y and the youngest is Lost.

So, the lost generation. Well, they are today’s young people who have recently finished school in Canada and have a freshly minted double major in “the felted fabric art of the Faxaflói Fiord in Iceland” and “fat studies” with a minor in “spoken Aramaic” and are making payments on their line of credit by pumping out quad-shot mocha lattes at a cafe close to their parents’ home, aka their home. You’re right. You’re right. Not all graduates are possessors of such obscure degrees but, many of the letters granted are close to useless in today’s real job market. The lost have been sold a bill of goods. They were told to follow their hearts because the world was a great, big creative place looking for people who were fresh faced and eager put the “renaissance” into a world of hardcore technology. Realistically, some of those degrees are for professions like education and law and engineering. In Ontario alone, over sixty percent of people who have graduated with a bachelor’s degree in education are unable to find fulltime employment. In a recent Doc Zone documentary entitled The Jobless Generation, several of “The Lost” who were featured did, indeed, have wondrous degrees in such things as “international relations” and “urban geography” and “modern European studies” with minors in a romance language or two. While our country is crying for renewable energy specialists, nano medics, geriatric care specialists and tradespersons such as plumbers, electricians, carpenters, mechanics and masons, the Boomers sit back and smile as a crush of the lost rush to enroll in programs which almost guarantee unemployment or underemployment upon completion. Indeed, many of the boomers, well past their age of retirement, are still hanging onto precious jobs in the labour market.

As outlined in The Jobless Generation, Canada does not have a national strategy for education. Our children will graduate from secondary school having earned their pocket money babysitting or in a service industry when they should have been actively checking out the opportunities in “their field” either as an intern, a co-op student or a volunteer. We, The Boomers, have been too polite or too stupid to suggest that it wouldn’t hurt them to start thinking about, and working on, their working future when they are 14 or 15 years old. The reality of this is our children are graduating from high school knowing how to take an order at the drive-through window and mop a floor in a kitchen. They know how easy it is to find work in the service industry but don’t know anything practical about their dream career.

We boomed and they became lost in the dream of their dream job.

theresa@wellingtontimes.ca