I can’t see an internship angle on this piece – though, I do see the potential marketing opportunity for schools here. This is from a blog post written by an intern at the on-line magazine I contribute to (a-ha! there’s the internship angle):
Many Canadians are feeling the effects of the global economic downturn, but Korean immigrants, despite being well educated for the most part, are experiencing even greater hardship than most.
The recession has compounded their challenges by increasing the level of competition for employment and decreasing the viability of Korean-owned businesses, which have traditionally helped new immigrants integrate into the labour market while they are learning to speak English.
Koreans face different challenges than other immigrant groups. Approximately 20-per-cent of all immigrants to Canada arrive as skilled workers and principal applicants. That figure rises to almost 60 per cent by adding dependents and spouses. This is compared to 91-per-cent of Korean immigrants to the country, who arrived under the economic class, which is defined as individuals selected by Citizenship and Immigration Canada for their “skills and ability to contribute to Canada’s economy.”
Despite the fact that a majority of Koreans arrive as economic immigrants, many of them face challenges integrating into the Canadian labour market. The 2006 census showed a 9.5-per-cent unemployment rate among the Korean population in Vancouver, compared to a 7.1-per-cent rate for all visible minorities and a 6-per-cent rate for the city as a whole.
Min said the biggest challenge he faced when coming to Canada was not knowing how to speak English, which made it hard to find a job with established Canadian firms – and when they do it is often at entry level. A City of Vancouver study on the Korean community found that among employed immigrants, 39 per cent are working in low-wage sales and services positions and many more are self-employed.
The job fair in Richmond was big, but weird. Really weird. It was in the public library, but the thing is that the Richmond Public Library doesn’t seem to have any conference space, so they held the job fair between the aisles and in the check out area. Seriously, 50 companies spread over two floors, and squeezed into every available millimeter of aisle space.
Good companies mind you. There’s this fruit stand by my house that I though was a quaint little neighbourhood shop. Turns out they have about 50 locations around Vancouver and hire new people – including international students – each week. Or rather, they will be hiring international students, thanks to that meeting at the job fair, which made the whole trip worth it.
The next job fair – the 4th in 4 weeks is at the Vancouver Public Library on Thursday. You can find out about that here: http://www.cave-employment.com/events.php
If you’ve been reading the papers or watching TV over the last two weeks, you will have seen that BC took a big hit last month. The latest statistics show BC facing huge job loses, the worst since 2004.
They’re bad, and there’s no disguising it. But it’s mainly the goods producing sector and service sector taking the hit – that is to say forestry, mining, finance, real estate etc…
So not to minimize the bad news for them, there is little bad news for you as an intern, or a school with interns to place.
Our company assists schools in managing their internship and work experience programs. We do 3 kinds of placements for them and their students:
- Hospitality (food services, accommodation)
- Unpaid Professional Internships
- Paid Professional Internships
Schools worry, more than anything else, about the Hospitality program. They’ve been told by our competitors that the industry has collapsed and that placements are impossible.
This is from the latest release by BC Stats (the provincial government statistics agency):
While the magnitude of the job losses during the previous month was not repeated, employment in the service sector continued to slip in March (–0.1%). The largest drops in service sector employment were experienced in the finance, real estate & insurance (–5.7%) and information, culture & recreation (–4.5%) industries. Employment in the retail and wholesale trade industries slipped for a third straight month (–0.8%) while the transportation (+3.1%) and accommodation & food service (+4.5%) industries saw a boost.
That last line in bold – that’s your hospitality program. In 2008, Metro Vancouver had about 90,000 people employed in accommodation and food services. Last month, in our worst month of recession so far, the number actually continued to grow, rising 4.5%.
Summer is coming, the cruise ship season will be here soon, the Olympics are coming, and in fact even without those, we’re still seeing growth. I’ve been at 2 hospitality job fairs in the last 2 weeks, and I have 2 more in the next 2 weeks. The panic in the press asside – it is business as usual.
Now getting to unpaid professional internships – it’s a boom time. We have placements available in even the hardest hit industries – want to do an unpaid practicum in finance? Real Estate? Recruitment? How many interviews would you like?
Students at this point are more often than not, getting a choice of which company they will work with. Granted it still takes skills and connections. You can imagine how full the email inboxes of these companies are with job seekers – so if you’re not working with them now, it’s not going to happen.
Paid internships. These have never been easy. During the boom they were hard labour, and during the bust they’re hard labour. But, largely because of the cost involved in 6 months of studies and the risk inherint in leaving a scarce job to come to Canada in the first place, demand has self-corrected to meet supply.
One thing helping us to meet our obligations for paid professional placements is the early opening of the Richmond Skytrain line. This will now open on or before Labour Day in September. In other words, any student beginning their studies in a paid professional internship program, will be doing their internship after the Richmond Line has opened and during the run up to the Olympics.
Having Richmond available for placements will effectively double our supply of paid professional IT jobs and office admin.
So overall, in spite of the numbers you see on TV, when you dig down into the actual stats, we’re in good shape. This is the worst of times right now, maybe another 1 or 2 terrible months, and we’ll start to level out through the summer, and see major growth through fall and into the winter.
