Future of work

 
Canada is a hotspot for highly skilled immigrants looking to achieve their academic and professional goals. Early research shows that their selection is partly due to their perceived ability to integrate and adapt to fluctuations in Canada’s labour market, experiencing better economic outcomes than those with less education. More recent data, however, show that university-educated immigrants have slow starts on their economic journey during their first years following arrival to Canada. Whether they outperform, those who are less educated remains unclear. Longitudinal Immigration Database data shows that highly educated principal applicants who immigrated at ages 20–44 between 1990–2014 earned less than those with a high school education or less. This gap, however, reduces over the years, with the gap eliminated by the seventh or eighth year since migration. Researchers point to factors not examined in the report that may influence these outcomes, such as motivation and interpersonal skills, quality of university education or job, inability to improve human capital through upskilling or training sufficiently, and the possible scarring impacts of lower quality work in initial years.