Victoria Alleyne has up-close experience with generation jobless — the catchy term coined by the CBC to describe the increasing number of graduates who work in low-paid, part-time jobs that don’t require a degree. There are also many grads who take unpaid work placements because they can’t get the real thing.
“It’s really common, people going from internship to internship to internship,” said Alleyne in an interview. “A lot of these internships are just as hard if not harder to get as a regular job these days.”
Although an organization where Alleyne had completed a placement offered her a job, she was “shocked” at the difficulty of the job search process, especially since she had years of co-op and volunteer work experience. She also noticed that many of her fellow University of Waterloo grads were not getting interviews, let alone an offer of a full-time job — and they were starting to lose the motivation to continue on job hunting.
That phenomenon inspired the 25-year-old, who decided to pass on the job opportunity (she “likes new experiences”), to come up with Career Skills Incubator (CSCI), which she sees as a way to help job seekers “be more productive in that really sketchy time when you’re waiting for a job and you’re discouraged really easily.”
Alleyne thinks that mentors are one way to motivate job seekers to set goals or learn new skills and mentorship is at the heart of CSCI. Rather than matching people who hail from the same industry (unlike, for example, The Mentoring Partnership) Career Skills tries to hook up mentees to people with the skills they need. “We’re more goal-focused than a typical mentorship program,” she says.
Another aim of Career SkilIs is to find participants relevant and meaningful volunteer jobs; in fact, if the right position cannot be found then one can be created at CSCI, which has about 15 volunteers, including one who is creating an entire mentor training program for the organization. CSCI, which is housed in the Centre for Social Innovation, also hosts networking and other events.
Although CSCI can’t change the economic situation, Alleyne hopes that participants, who are mostly under 35, will “feel more positive about the situation as opposed to spending eight or 10 months or a year in isolation applying for jobs on their laptop and not developing at all as a person and not having a good time with their life.”
Alleyne, whose degree is in environment and business (as opposed to career counselling), eventually plans to return to the field of environmental sustainability. But “for now I am happy to see where this goes because it’s taking on momentum,” she says.
Article written by: Katherine O'Brien from www.poss.ca. Article originally posted: http://poss.ca/en/content/career-idea-hatched
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