The Current - Why Gen Z's jobless rate should matter to everyone

Episode Date: July 2, 2025

More young Canadians are out of work than at any point in decades–excluding during the COVID-19 pandemic. The youth unemployment rate is now more than 14 per cent and for students returning to school this fall the anxiety of the world to come after school is daunting. We hear from two Gen Z job seekers about the emotional toll of a stagnant job market, and a labour expert on what this might signal about Canada’s economy.

If you want to hear daily news that doesn't hurt your soul and might even be good for your soul, check out As It Happens. I'm Chris Howden. And I'm Nielke Oksal. Every day we reach people at the center of the most extraordinary stories, like the doctor who restored a patient's eyesight with a tooth. Or a musician in an orchestra that plays instruments made out of vegetables. Take the scenic route through the day's news with As It Happens, and you can find us wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is The Current Podcast. Job hunting is rarely easy, but for Gen Z right now, it's turning out to be historically difficult.

The unemployment rate in Canada for people aged 15 to 24 is over 14 percent, the highest it's been in decades. For those young people looking for work, it can be demoralizing and anxiety inducing. From unpaid internships to entry-level positions somehow requiring years of experience, the path to meaningful employment feels increasingly out of reach. There are implications for the broader economy and its health, more on that in a moment. But first, I'm joined by two young people struggling with job searches. Cassandra Ogilino is heading into her third year as a political science major at the University of British Columbia. She's in Sioux Lookout, Ontario for the summer. Ben Gooch graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering last

year from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Good morning to you both. Hello. Good morning. How are you? Ben, let's start with you. You've got a degree in mechanical engineering. How long you been looking for a job in your field?

I've been looking for a job just over a year now. And how's it been going? Not very good at all. I've been applying to any position that's in the field because this is what I want to do and it's just very hard to even hear Back from a company. What kind of responses are you getting? Most of them are just automated replies But I'd say the the other half of them just no response at all. How many places have you applied to? It's been over a hundred now a hundred places have you applied to? It's been over a hundred now.

A hundred. What's that like to just keep sending out the resume, keep looking on job sites? It's very demoralizing and you kind of start like, it feels like you're on a timer almost. It's like I have to start something soon, so it's very stressful. Boy, have you had any bites at all? I mean, I heard you recently had an AI job interview. Yes, I did an AI interview for a power company here in Ontario, which was an interesting experience.

Yeah, tell me about it. What happens in an AI interview? So it's just a screen where you're just looking at yourself because it's recorded and then a question will pop up and you have about 20 to 30 seconds to think about the question and you have four minutes to answer the question and AI grades you and decides if they want to move on with the hiring process. That must have made you feel very impersonal. Yeah, it was very hard to talk because you don't have another person to bounce back off

of and you can't really tell like how much more information you should be Giving to these questions. Wow, okay So that's gonna be really frustrating to not find something in engineering, but I hear you did manage to find a job Yeah for the summer. I got seasonal work at a nursery. That's local here. And how does that going? It's pretty good. I enjoy it But like the hours are not like it's lot of people were hired, so getting like a lot of hours is a little complicated sometimes. It's also, it's not giving me experience in the field that I have a degree in and I

want to work in. So it's not, it doesn't feel like it's helping me get a job with what I want to do. Yeah. When you trained as a mechanical engineer, but you're working at a nursery, that must be pretty frustrating. Yeah, it is pretty frustrating. Cassandra, let's bring you in here. You're still a student at UBC. Let's start with your search for a

part-time job over the school year. What was that like? Sort of like throwing resumes into a void. What kind of jobs were you applying for? Entry-level jobs, mostly. It seems like that's what I could qualify for. A lot of like jobs that I wanted, like I want to work at a law firm. So that's something that I have to finish my degree for or finish law school for. Sure. Yeah.

And so all of these jobs want you to finish your bachelor's degree or have some experience in that field. So the only thing that I can really qualify for right now are entry level jobs. And how many jobs did you apply for? More than 100 since last August. Boy, and were you getting any feedback? Yeah, so I guess like in Vancouver, I wasn't really getting that much feedback. It was really rare for employers to even call me and tell me that they went through with

another candidate and usually just get like no response or like an automated response from email. As those piled up, how frustrating does that get? It was really frustrating. I know that it's because of like the job market, but it sort of felt like I was a bit left behind. Like for my age, like I wasn't getting a job, I wasn't moving up and I just wasn't saving enough money. And how did that impact your finances if you weren't able to find a part-time job during the school year? Living in Vancouver, it's pretty expensive. Yeah, well, I guess I wouldn't have been able to move out. The only reason why I'm like

able to live on my own is because I do get scholarship funding. But if I didn't have that, it's sort of impossible for me. Cassandra, Statistics Canada has put the unemployment rate for returning students aged 15 to 24 in May this year year it was 20 percent. How hard was it to find a summer job for you? It was pretty hard in Vancouver. It's a little bit different in where I'm staying right now. In Sioux Lookout? Yes. And what kind of job did you end up finding? So I'm sort of working as a dietary aid. I haven't started my training yet, but I'm starting it very soon. So it's been interesting looking for jobs, like and seeing the contrast between these two places.

But in Vancouver, it's a lot harder. Ben, you got, you crossed the stage. You got that piece of paper. It said you graduated in mechanical engineering. When you look at where you're at now, post-graduation, and compare it to where your parents may have been around the same age, what do you think? So part of the reason I went into engineering

is everyone in my life told me, if you get a degree in a STEM field like this, you'll be able to work anywhere. And it feels very different from their experiences, because they were able to get jobs right out of university in what their degree is and now I am very struggling. Like, I don't even feel qualified for a lot of entry-level jobs it feels like. And Cassandra, I can ask you the same question. Do you get older folks that kind of look at you and say, oh, those Gen Zers, you know,

you're kind of lazy. You're not hustling like we had to back in the day. Do you hear that from older people? Oh, yeah. I hear that a lot. What do you say to them? I'm not really sure what to say. Like when people tell me that I know that they're wrong, though, just when older people tell me things like, oh, well, you're never too good for so-and-so job, you know, just apply for it

I'm like I do apply for and I've applied for more and it's like people my age That I know are really hard workers. And so it's just the circumstance of it all that just makes it seem like You know, we're not wanting to go out there But when in fact we do want to put ourselves out there and are very much trying to. And Ben, same question to you. What do you tell older people that say that, you know, you just need to pull up your socks a little bit? It's a very hard discussion to have in good faith. I'm just giving my experiences. So it's like, this is my anecdotal experience that I'm having. And I'm trying, like, I feel like I am, I am a very hard worker. I put a lot of effort.

I've been, have had part-time jobs since I started high school. And it's just, I got a degree for a reason. I paid all this money for this degree. So I want to work in this field. And it's just, it doesn't feel like it's even possible right now. I wonder, Cassandra, you're still in school. What kind of strategy do you have to find work while you're in school this upcoming school year? I think what works really great is using connections.

Everybody always says that. It's a bit annoying, but there's some truth to that. Also applying to a company website and then directly emailing HR or the hiring department and just like introducing yourself that like worked for me. Last question for you, Ben. I mean, as you're looking into the future, your future, what do you think it might look like?

Uh, that's, it's a scary question. It's right now I'm just viewing options. Like I'm still applying for full-time jobs, but I'm like considering, do I go back to school? Do I try to get get more experience from just school because I can't get job experience to maybe try and get a job that way? Do I have to move to a different country

or relocate far away from my family to even have a chance at getting a job? Which is scary because you need savings to be able to relocate like that. I know how anxiety-ind inducing all this is. So I really want to thank you both for sharing your job hunting search with us. Oh, thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate it. Yes, thank you for having us on here, Duncan.

Cassandra Agalino is a political science student at the University of British Columbia. Ben Guch is a recent mechanical engineering graduate from McMaster University. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about.

Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401 check out this is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts Trisha Williams is the Director of Research at the Future Skills Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University dedicated to studying the future of work she joins us from Burlington, Ontario. Good morning. Good morning.

You listened in to Ben and Cassandra there. What do you make of what they're saying about the job market? I mean, your heart just breaks for them. They're clearly trying hard. So you know, you have a lot of empathy and say, you know, they want to, you know, join the career ladder, right? They want to find that first place on the rung. How concerning are the youth unemployment numbers right now? Oh, very concerning. When you start to see numbers like 20 percent,

you know, unemployment around between students, between 15 and 24, you're concerned. But just to put this a little bit in context, even in the COVID times where we were very at high employment, full employment, even then we saw youth employment figures of unemployment numbers of around 11%. So the youth number always is a little bit higher than the rest, but this is definitely concerned. There's some economists calling this the canary in the coalmine for the

broader economy. Is that fair? I mean I think it is a signal that maybe hiring is starting to soften. I'm one of those who's used that phrase before. But I do think one of the things about a canary in a coal mine is it lets us take some action. So we can actually say, okay, now is the time to take some action to prevent maybe wider economic and employment impact. When we're talking about the wider economic impacts of youth unemployment, you've used the phrase wage scarring. Can you explain that to us? Yeah, so this is some research we did not too long ago that looked at the impacts of unemployment on

youth. And actually we found that a 1% increase in the provincial youth unemployment rate, so if it goes up by 1% in the year of graduation, results in an ongoing decline in earnings for young people even five years after graduation. So that means if you just graduate into a period of economic recession, you are more at risk of having lower income throughout, you know, at least the first part of your career. It's hard to come back from that. Let's dig into the numbers a little bit more. As I mentioned, the unemployment rate is particularly high for students returning to school, so those looking for summer jobs.

Why? Why are there so few summer jobs for students right now? I mean, that's a great question. I think a million dollar question. So for one thing I'd say is it's very sector dependent, right? So right now I think we're actually seeing pretty strong employment numbers in hospitality and tourism. There's a lot of focus on staying in Canada. Those tend to be student jobs. We maybe have some hope in some of those service sectors. But I think there is also growing kind of awareness

that we need to keep our eye on AI automation. To what extent is it kind of removing some of those entry-level jobs or at least shifting what they look like. So I don't think the evidence is strong enough to say it's definitely causal, but it's certainly something we're paying attention to. But what about, I mean, traditionally you see kids during the summer doing summer camps, painters, lifeguards, aren't those the work that still needs to be done? You would think. You would think it definitely needs to be done.

And I hope there are, you know, this is part of the problem of labor statistics, right? You get more after the fact than you get preemptively. So when we look at the data for the summer, I expect we will still see that a lot of those roles were filled by students or young people. The question is, are there enough? Are there people who, you know, maybe want to work like, you know, Cassandra said, in a law firm? She'd like to work in a law

firm. Maybe right now, you know, law firms are saying, yeah, you know, we used to hire, you know, a university college student to do some kind of scoping reviews or, you know, look at case law, but now we can get AI to do most of that, right? So you might start to see some of that displacement and think that people have to think a little bit differently about their initial career search. I want to ask you about AI because Ben brought it up, but mentioning Ben, I mean, I feel for him too because he has graduated, he wants to get work in his field and he's having trouble getting started in his career. What is behind the high unemployment rate for that cohort of graduates?

Well, I mean, I was absolutely scared to hear that he's having fully AI interviews already because I think the technology is largely untested. And so I hope that, you know, whoever is kind of running those employment processes are doing some comparisons and saying, are we getting good people out of this? Like what is the trade-offs? You know, we also have to think about equity issues when it comes to AI. You know, is the AI as good at assessing somebody with an accent? We need to look at some of those equity issues. As you start to again dig into these numbers, how much of an impact are you seeing on AI and automation? I mean, when I go into a grocery store now,

the cashiers have been replaced by self-checkouts, factory workers, they're being replaced by robots to handle packages, things like that. How much is AI and automation playing into this youth unemployment? You can't study the future of work and not be concerned about AI and automation. We released a report in January with the Institut de Québec and looking at the impact of AI on employment in Quebec, we found broadly that there is a portion of the workforce that's vulnerable to automation.

In Quebec, we estimated it to be about 18%. But in youth, they're overrepresented. So while youth are only 13% of the workforce in Quebec, they represent 24% of the workforce vulnerable to automation. Exactly for the reason you mentioned. They're overrepresented in certain professions like cashiers, waiters, waitresses,

these things that are really ripe for disruption. The one thing I will say in terms of an opportunity is that going forward over the next 10, 20 years, especially as we focus on AI adoption across the economy, which Prime Minister Carney has focused on as a goal, we're going to be looking for people to help us understand how to integrate AI. So this is about, you know, and young people I think are particularly well suited to thinking about how to integrate and how to not just be replaced by AI, but how to

leverage your skills and combine it with AI. We're all trying to figure out how AI is going to impact us. You're talking about integration, but how to leverage your skills and combine it with AI. Well, we're all trying to figure out how AI is going to impact us. You're talking about integration, but there are others. I mean, they're talking about a job apocalypse. Last month, the CEO of Anthropic, one of the largest AI companies in the world, said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white collar jobs, predicting a massive spike in unemployment in the next one to five years. How do we protect those entry-level jobs for youth that we

know are so important? Well, I listened to that interview and I will say, you know, the predictions about how many jobs that the the internet would deplace were not borne out by the tech companies. So I think tech companies tend to be a little bullish on some of these predictions. That being said, I think the overall trend is yes, we need to be investing in skills, thinking about how it's reshaping positions, not necessarily removing all positions.

So for instance, in manufacturing, there's a lot of digital integration in manufacturing. You know, so you need digital skills even while you're working on a factory floor. In terms of what we can do, I mean, the government did a pretty good program a couple years ago around some subsidies for businesses to hire young people. I think we might look at some of those similar social investments to lessen the impact on the employer, but also make sure that young people are getting

the valuable experience and building their career trajectory. You mentioned government programming. One you haven't mentioned yet was temporary foreign workers. There's been a lot of controversy. The Trudeau government placed limits on the number of temporary foreign workers allowed into Canada last year. You know, we know that there were surges before. So those numbers have reduced in the past year, allowed into Canada last year. You know, we know that there were surges before. So, those

numbers have reduced in the past year, but some people are still pointing to those workers and saying they're taking jobs away from Canadian youth. What is your analysis on that? I mean, we don't really see evidence thus far that there's a direct correlation between these two things that there are temporary foreign workers taking the jobs of young people. What I will say is I think the government did probably over-index a little bit on bringing in temporary foreign workers because of demands. And again, two years ago, we were in a labor shortage. It was called a labor crisis. So it's hard to land the needle exactly. And just to point out

that temporary foreign workers tend to come in, in general, for very specific sectoral opportunities. So for instance, you know, the agricultural temporary foreign worker program, there are not many Canadian students that are willing to do the kind of really hard agricultural labor needed to bring in our crops. Pete Slauson Last question here. I mean, this is a bit of a numbers game and unemployment numbers come up and they go down. But this seems very, very high, the youth unemployment rate right now. What's at stake here if it doesn't come down? Jennifer Snell You've got to start with empathy for the

students involved. How do we make sure that we can assist these students, right? They've made good faith investments in their skills and training. I think there's some really creative policy happening at the provincial and territorial levels too. So a few years ago, the government of Alberta said every student in a college or university program needs to have a work integrated learning opportunity, and regardless of what field you're in. So not just the technology fields, not just those, but also if you're a philosophy major, an English major, we want you to have a work integrated learning opportunity. And I think that is more the future of learning, is thinking about ways to combine the academic experience with practical work experience. And I think

that will serve students better in the future. Thank you for sharing your expertise on this. Thank you so much, Duncan. Trisha Williams is the Director of Research at the Future Skills Center at Toronto Metropolitan University. You've been listening to The Current Podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.