Staff Changes and Challenges in Youth Employment Centres

The end of the recession has been widely reported throughout Canadian media within the past couple of months. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting struggle to find jobs is over. Despite greater economic stability, the labour market requires more time to catch up. With unemployment rates up, many youth are sifting through their options and finding guidance from the employment professionals within their communities. That being said, many employment counsellors and agency directors are experiencing an overwhelming surplus of clients when compared with years past. Sound familiar?

During discussions with a group of youth employment centre directors from across Ontario, one professional from Sudbury noted “We’ve been putting in a lot of extra overtime just trying to meet the needs of everybody.” Another manager concurred “There’s been lots of overtime, which is almost burning some people out.”

The issue of burnout is very relevant amongst professionals in the domain of employment counselling. One Toronto manager noted that “Since January (2009), we have been overwhelmed so much so that we don’t really have the counsellors to take care of the influx. So what we’ve done is we’ve tried to train other staff like resource staff to do initial intakes. It’s been crazy the amount of info sessions that we’ve had to do.”

With such a variety client needs to be met, one major concern is the range of tasks and types of programs that staff need to be trained for. One youth employment centre director put it this way: “We provide service to both adults and youth, but we’re trying to get our youth workers trained in a variety of programs. It is a tremendous learning curve. This is not something that people can learn overnight.”

Another employment professional raised a few important questions “Are our employment case managers well-educated enough - and can we educate them enough - to be such generalists? Who are we in trying to help so many different kinds of people and situations?”.

Another director agreed that as a result of the diversity of their clients, it’s difficult to provide programs and services tailored to individual needs, something that she considers to be very important. “If the client is16 years old with a baby, 18 years old and has dropped out of high school, or 22 with a degree, the difference is so huge. And the needs that these people demonstrate are so different that I don’t know if [anyone is] equipped to deal with the variance amongst the types of clients.”

On the other hand, one manager explained how the recession has impacted her youth employment centre by creating expansion as a result of increased funding. “We’ve hired 12 new staff within the last 12 months, and being a small agency that’s quite a lot of staff to be adding. We have really mushroomed as a result of this crisis, but it’s really put a lot of pressure on everybody because as you say, the training alone takes a lot of time and it really puts a lot of pressure on people to do more work when they may not know the system quite as well as they should when they’re dealing with peoples’ lives. It’s a lot of responsibility.”

How has your organization been coping with the influx of clients and their range of needs? What do you think might help youth employment professionals to deal with these issues?

[This blog is based on interviews conducted through the Cross Canada Dialogues project, funded by the Counselling Foundation of Canada and implemented by First Work]