Ontario / Jobs hard to find for graduates

Two years after graduating from college with an accounting degree, Amanda Coombes expected to be working full-time in her field. Instead, she’s living with her mom and working at McDonald’s.

These days, in hard-hit Ontario, a job is a job.

“It’s hard for us,” Coombes, 23, said of the challenges she and her fellow graduates face in their search for work in their chosen field. Older applicants, some laid off after 25 years in the business, offer life and work experience that make them formidable rivals.

“We’re competing with people who have been trying to find work and have three times the amount of experience as we do.”

Coombes is among the casualties of Ontario’s precipitous decline from the country’s economic engine to its most populous have-not province.

National Household Survey data released Wednesday by Statistics Canada shows that Ontario had two of the three urban centres with the lowest share of employment income as a percentage of total income – Peterborough and St. Catharines, at 67 per cent and 66.6 per cent, respectively.

Statcan has already reported that the unemployment rate for 15- to 24-year-olds has reached 16.4 per cent, compared to Ontario’s overall rate of 7.5 per cent.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story at 

via Jobs hard to find for graduates in Canada’s most populous have-not province – Toronto | Globalnews.ca.