Career Transitions in Canada – Can be challenging across major job categories

Most Canadians who want to make a career transition have viable and desirable options, especially if they possess, or are willing to learn, the skills, abilities, tools, and technologies required for their destination occupation.

Highlights of the report

• Canadians have viable and desirable job transition options available to them. The best of these options require similar skills and knowledge and offer higher pay in sectors and industries with growing employment. Knowledge jobs and in-the-field jobs offer the highest numbers of transition opportunities.
• However, some specialized or highly paid occupations have few or no viable and desirable transitions. Canadians seeking to move out of these roles may require retraining, a move to another sector, or willingness to take a pay cut.
• To combat labour shortages, employers should broaden their recruiting pool to include non-traditional occupations that are characteristically similar in terms of the skills required for vacant roles, rather than focusing on just specific education and/or experience requirements.

Although most occupations have multiple transition options, it is less common for those moves to be from one major job category to a completely different one. (See Chart 2.)

However, some occupations have a characteristics-based pathway that helps them transcend this job-group boundary. For example, most transition options for roles in the education, law, and social, community, and government services occupational group are to jobs outside that group. This reflects the high transferability of the social and emotional skills (e.g., active listening, speaking, and critical thinking) that typify these roles.

For other such boundary-crossing occupations, limited transitions within their group result in most of their options lying elsewhere. Consider the natural resources, agriculture, and related occupations group, or the art, culture, recreation, and sport group. For both, less than 15 per cent of transitions lie within their own occupational group. For natural resources, agriculture, and related occupations, a key reason for the limited number of in-group transitions is that many of those roles are expected to experience declining employment over the next 10 years, and therefore do not qualify as desirable transitions.

The diverse and highly specialized skills characteristics of jobs in the art, culture, recreation, and sport occupational group severely limit their pool of qualifying transitions, with most being moves to outside roles. Indeed, around 40 per cent of the occupations in this group have less than five transitions, and several have no transitions at all.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story @ A Path Forward – Job Transitions in Canada | Future Skills Centre • Centre des Compétences futures