How do career development professionals deliver labour market information to their clients?
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In our recent report, Navigating labour market information: Challenges faced by career development professionals, we discussed the challenges that career development professionals encounter when finding and using labour market information (LMI) to assist their clients.
Our report detailed several important findings:
Some LMI is challenging to find.
Clients require LMI that is connected to their journeys and decision points.
Career development professionals must navigate significant barriers and pain points to process and use LMI.
LMI must be simplified so that career development professionals can better support their clients.
As a result, our report also called on organizations that produce and disseminate LMI to ensure it is simple, usable and easily found.
Using the same research initiative that informed our previous report, this article will review what we learned about the different ways that career development professionals share LMI with their clients.
Career development professionals are important
LMI brokers
Career development professionals provide diverse services to their clients, including assessing job readiness, guiding career decisions, suggesting opportunities for skill enhancement, offering advice about job maintenance, and facilitating conversations about career growth.
Their work is comprehensive in scope and relies on access to timely, granular and relevant LMI to inform and guide clients’ decision making.
How do career professionals deliver LMI to their clients?
Career development professionals use a range of methods to share LMI with clients. The variability results from differences in clients’ needs, preferences, prior understandings of LMI, and digital literacy skills.
Among the career development professionals we surveyed, 81% conduct their LMI research independently and then inform clients of their findings. Once the information is ready, 61% present it to clients on a screen, while 46% prefer to write it down for clients.
Regardless of how LMI will be passed on to clients, career development professionals want information that is simple, easily shared and easy to understand. According to our research, the most frequent LMI formats that career development professionals share with their clients are:
Notably, close to half of the surveyed career development professionals said they like to receive LMI in the form of detailed reports. This finding differs from the responses received in previous LMIC research initiatives, which indicated that simple and short LMI products are most useful. The new results suggest there is a segment of the career development professional audience that is well-versed in LMI and able to accurately interpret and share the information from technical and detailed reports.
The way forward
It’s important for the organizations that produce and disseminate LMI to ensure it’s easy to access, understand and share.
Across our research about how career development professionals share LMI with clients, usable is a key term. For LMI to be usable to career development professionals and their clients, organizations must consider how the information will be used and distributed. This will improve their service for end users.
As noted in our recent report, challenges accessing LMI mean that Canadians are not as well supported as they could be when making important career and life decisions.
This is a significant and persistent challenge in Canada. We know that only one in five adults aged 25 to 64 years have received career services in the past five years—a much lower proportion than in other OECD countries. Equipping career development professionals with the tools and skills to navigate LMI will bring about a critical increase in their capacity to serve all people in Canada.
These challenges dovetail with others identified in the broader LMI ecosystem in Canada:
We continue to call on the LMI ecosystem to close these gaps, to prioritize innovation, and to develop, endorse, adopt and advocate for best practices and principles in LMI.
We would appreciate learning about how you like to access and engage with LMI. Please e-mail Lorena Camargo, principal researcher, at lorena.camargo@lmic-cimt.ca to share your feedback.
Lorena Camargo
Principal Researcher
Lorena Camargo contributes to contemporary, forward-looking research projects about labour market issues in Canada. Her expertise includes innovation policy and global markets.