How 3 young Islanders have negotiated the pandemic job market

This story is part of the series Job Shift: How work on P.E.I. has changed in the pandemic. Find more of these stories here.

Work life has been a struggle for most people on P.E.I., but it has been particularly difficult for young Islanders.

While Islanders established in the workforce have had to deal with figuring out how to work from home, workplace outbreaks, and regularly changing public health rules, younger Islanders are more likely to have been put out of a job altogether, or been struggling to find work in areas that were previously reliable.

That uncertainty is reflected in the volatility of the unemployment rate, with the rate for young people seeing much bigger swings than the overall rate.

The overall rate peaked at 14.3 per cent in June 2020. The youth rate hit 26.4 per cent that month, and remained over 14 per cent until January. In 2021, it was back over 14 per cent in June, August and October. The overall rate was below 10 per cent for nine months in 2021.

Young people, noted UPEI economist Jim Sentance, are more likely to work in service industries such as restaurants and retail, where the pandemic has caused the most disruption.

"There have been periods where that has just been shut down and work isn't available," said Sentance.

A daily search for jobs

McKenna Moore, a third-year student at UPEI, has watched more than one job opportunity disappear during the pandemic.

She was working for the athletics department at UPEI when it started, and the closing down of activities at the sports centre led to her being laid off. She found work at GoodLife Fitness in January 2021, but public health restrictions were creating complications for that business as well. She was being offered short hours, and was having trouble reconciling what she was being offered with her class schedule.

Moore left GoodLife in September, and hasn't been able to find suitable employment since.

"Every single day. Honestly, I check Indeed at least three or four times a day. I try to check other job sites.… Anywhere to try to find something," she said.

Moore is aiming to study physiotherapy. It's a difficult program to get into, and she is looking for work that will give her more experience working with the public as part of building her resumé.

"It's just a lack of variety of jobs," she said, adding it's definitely worse in the pandemic.

"There was always a lot more options out there."

Not making connections

Lily Balderston has been fortunate. She had three part-time jobs before the pandemic started and has been able to keep them all.

She is working in retail at Owl's Hollow, which is her family's business, she teaches sailing in the summer, and she also has an internship with a computer science professor.

While she is set up for part-time work as a student, Balderston has concerns about launching her career after graduation, precisely because of how she got the internship job. One of her professors knew the internship was available and recommended her.

"I was able to connect with that professor because it was in person, it was a very small class and because I made that connection with him he recommended me for the internship," she said.

"If things had been online that year then I wouldn't have been able to get it."

UPEI is planning to return to in-person classes in March, but Balderston knows she has already missed out on opportunities to make connections. She said she hasn't gotten to know any of her professors in the last two years.

And it's not just professors. She isn't connecting with fellow students either. Everyone has their cameras off in the online classes, and there is little interaction.

"Having connections, especially on P.E.I., is like the best way to find a job," she said.

Pandemic removing options

Like McKenna Moore, Sasha Weekes has found previously reliable sources of work failed her during the pandemic.

The 27-year-old was doing pretty well in January of 2020. Having completed a cabinetmaking course at Holland College she had launched a woodworking business through Etsy. She liked being self-employed, and was in her first year as a business student at UPEI while continuing to operate the woodworking shop.

The business boomed briefly after the pandemic started, then faded for reasons she was never certain of.

But she had regular fallbacks. In previous summers she had worked as a waitress part-time and picked up some money coaching at Andrews Hockey School in Charlottetown.

"The pandemic kind of took both those options away," Weekes said.

Looking for a summer job in the spring of 2021, she used a strategy that had worked for her before, sending out five to 10 resumés to restaurants around town. In that previous spring she had five offers for interviews. Last spring the response was much quieter.

It's not where I thought I would be.— Sasha Weekes

"I got no replies, except for the restaurant that I used to work at said they would have me back, and then they didn't," she said.

Weekes was not able to find work last summer, and she had pretty much given up on finding anything this year before the school semester ended.

Then the unexpected happened. A friend of hers, working at Tops to Floors in Summerside, said there was a job for her there designing kitchens. Weekes had a little bit of previous experience with kitchens.

Not only was it a part-time job, there was a promise of a move to full-time after she graduated.

"If I was able to have a part-time job to hold me over I probably would have been more likely to keep being self-employed, but I ended up just taking a full-time job," said Weekes.

"It's not where I thought I would be, but I'm actually pretty happy."

Demographic trends on their side

There are signs the job market may be turning around for youth.

In the last few months the unemployment rate for Islanders aged 15 to 24 has been cut in half, but it is not all good news. Only young men have seen an actual growth in the number of jobs. The rate for young women has changed largely because they have been leaving the workforce.

In January the participation rate for women, which had been more than 70 per cent in late 2019 and through to February 2020, fell below 50 per cent for the first time since the start of the pandemic.

Jim Sentance believes, however, that a change is coming, noting that there was improvement even as the province locked down for the Omicron variant.

"What's it going to look like when things open up a whole lot more?" he said.

Sentance thinks back to 2019, part of a string where the Island tourism industry broke records in five of six years, when P.E.I. regularly had the lowest unemployment rate for youth in Canada.

The long-term trends are also promising for youth job prospects. The Island-born cohort of people aged 15 to 24 is smaller than it has been in decades. Immigration has been making up some of the difference, but Sentance believes worker shortages that employers have been complaining of will grow worse.

Other economic factors are also at play.

"The cost of living, in particular the cost of housing here, must be making a number of people rethink what they're willing to do, what kind of wage they're willing to work for," said Sentance.

That could lead to further problems for the traditionally low-paying service sector on P.E.I.