CareerMotion

The current generation of Canadian youth has, on average, more education than any of its preceding generations. However, a certain number of highly educated young workers end up in jobs that require far less education or far fewer skills than they have. Studies show that in Canada between 20 and 30 per cent of post-secondary graduates work in low-skilled occupations. Why do so many graduates find themselves in a job situation that does not meet their expectations and skills? What are the best ways to help them reach their full potential on the labour market and get their career in motion?

To address these important questions, SRDC has launched a new demonstration project called CareerMotion. The project is designed to provide reliable evidence on whether the labour market competencies of graduates from colleges and universities can be improved by providing them with job search and career planning tools that are tailored to their needs.

CareerMotion will involve 700 graduates living in British Columbia. Participants will be recruited among post-secondary graduates under the age of 40 who consider themselves overqualified for their most recent or current job. Eligible participants will have to hold a degree, diploma, or certificate from a Canadian post-secondary institution (college or university) obtained more than a year ago. They can be either working or unemployed and looking for work.

Participants in the CareerMotion project will have access to a customized Web portal that provides a wide range of information about today’s labour market. Labour market information resources will be organized in ways that guide job seekers through five key stages of career planning and job search: conducting self-assessments, generating opportunities, researching alternatives, making decisions, and planning actions.

The tool was designed by career counselors in British Columbia to provide relevant labour market information and activities that can help participants reach their full potential by

• relating resources and links to identified needs of the users,
• identifying learning outcomes that users can expect by following a given resource or link, and 
• making the information readable, browsable, and searchable.

It will provide participants opportunities to gather and process occupational information and encourage them to record in writing their goals, future plans, and occupational analyses.

Methodology

SRDC is conducting the evaluation of CareerMotion as a social experiment, based on the rigorous research design of random assignment. Participants are randomly assigned to one of two experimental groups: a program group that is given access to the Web portal or a comparison group. Participants assigned to the comparison group serve as a counterfactual, providing an unbiased determination of the effects of the intervention. Because program and comparison groups will be similar in all other respects, differences in participants’ experiences over time can be attributed to the impact of the intervention.

Drawing on the social cognitive theory of career choices, and in particular, the application of Albert Bandura’s self-efficacy construct to career decision making, the research study will assess whether the Web-based intervention designed to improve key career competencies will

• increase participants’ career decision making self-efficacy and job search self-efficacy,
• lead to better job search clarity and more effective job search activities, and ultimately
• improve participants’ employment situation.

The experiences of participants in the program and control groups will be assessed through surveys completed through a Web-based application. A baseline survey will be administered at the time of enrolment and a follow-up survey will take place five weeks later to capture the effects of providing participants with this customized labour market information Web portal. The effectiveness of the CareerMotion portal will be measured using validated psychometric scales and questionnaires to assess participants’ competencies in making decisions about their career and engaging in job search activities that can improve their employment outcomes.

Status

Recruitment of participants in the CareerMotion project started in early 2010 and research findings will be available in October 2010. In February 2009, SRDC published Improving Career Decision-Making of Young Workers, which presents the analytical framework for the study of job search and career planning behavior and puts forward a set a guiding principles for the design of the Web-based intervention.

Funding

CareerMotion is funded by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada.

Information

For more information about CareerMotion, visit www.careermotion.ca or contact Carole Vincent, SRDC project director.