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When choosing a postsecondary educational institution and program or an apprenticeship, it is critically important that you get as much information as you can including educational trends and opinions from current students or apprentices and alumni or journeypeople. This is doubly important for university students because of how costly university education is, both in terms of time and money, as well as the fact that university culture is commonly farther removed from the world of work than the polytechnic or apprenticeship educational models.
Our service strives to go beyond traditional educational/career planning, which typically focuses on exploring individuals’ interests and aptitudes, and allows you to get an idea for what is happening in the real world so that you can adjust your expectations and plan accordingly. After all, although your enthusiasm for, and talent in a particular field may be important components of success, there is no guarantee that there will be a place for you in the constantly shifting job market, especially in a country that ranks near the top of postsecondary educational attainment in the developed world.
Our ad-free subscription data service currently allows you to use interactive maps and charts to explore the demographic profiles, including population size and gender distribution, of graduating classes (completions) for all programs at all Canadian public post secondary institutions between 2010 and 2021 and provincial apprenticeship programs between 2008 and 2022 for a modest annual fee.
You can explore the relative size of graduating classes between programs and find out if they have been expanding or contracting in recent years at the institutional (as applicable), provincial, or national level. This will give you some idea of the relative popularity of a given program both geographically and over time, as well as how many people you may be competing with to either enter the work force or to gain acceptance to a more advance educational program, whichever the case may be.
While we were university students, we observed that after final year students graduate from a given program, they typically have little communication with the students who remain in more junior years. Consequently, the remaining students generally do not get to find out how the graduating students fared in the work force or graduate school, whichever the case may be.
Our forum here is free for all to use and aims to provide a platform where students and prospective students alike can ask questions related to specific educational programs at specific institutions across Canada or specific provinces in the case of apprenticeships, and current students/alumni or apprentices/journeypeople can respond or simply post an unsolicited comment about the program/trade they are taking or have taken for the benefit of others.
Please be advised that there is no guarantee that someone will be able to answer your question, nor is there any way to confirm the validity of individual responses so they should be taken with a grain of salt. However, multiple responses corroborating each other should prove more useful than having no information at all and provide a starting point for further investigation. Please avoid naming individuals and strive to keep all posts as relevant, accurate, and honest as possible, as well as civil and free from profanity and defamation (inappropriate ones will be removed).
To the extent that it occurs at all, educational/career planning in Canada focuses on the interests and aptitudes of the individual without consideration for supply and demand in the labour market. While interests and aptitudes are important considerations in educational/ career decisions, they can be easily usurped by market forces.
Canada’s educational system at all levels is particularly insular with few ties to industry or the working world in general, making informed educational/career decisions challenging at best for sheltered students since organizational or industry demographics, culture, and prevailing hiring practices remain concealed to them. High school teachers, career councillors/student advisors, and university professors alike are most often lifelong unionized civil servants, who through no fault of their own, have little knowledge of industry or the inner workings of the economy and job market. Furthermore, the system gives them no incentive to increase the employability of their students and graduate outcomes have no bearing on their career advancement. To their credit, polytechnics/community colleges do better in this regard (at least they make an effort and aren’t afraid to advertise it).
As education is a provincial responsibility, educational statistics at the national level are hard to come by in Canada and even at the provincial or institutional level, availability of readily accessible statistics are highly inconsistent.
Personal interaction with university students and recent graduates at industry conferences in recent years suggests that educational/career planning resources at Canadian universities are woefully inadequate.
Adding to the confusion of naïve and unsuspecting students, professional societies/associations/ regulators shamelessly promote their respective professions to the public regardless of market conditions, whether it is prudent or not.
Less than optimal educational/career decisions can have serious financial implications for individuals since average debt for university graduates in Canada is over $26,000 (Stats Canada), and collectively has detrimental societal and economic implications (under/unemployment, misallocation of resources, and decreased productivity).
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