Labour Market Information for Career Decision Making

Sorting It All Out

The vast amount of information available and the need to have specific information to make informed career choices have led to a basic change in how a career counsellor counsels. Many clients expect to get all the answers from the practitioner, but it is impossible for one person to know all the information across all occupations and industries. This has led practitioners to act as information brokers, steering clients and students to different sources that suit their need for individualized information. Although practitioners cannot know all the answers, they must be aware of venues for clients or students to find the answers they need and strategies for helping clients find more venues on their own. The counsellor or teacher is only the first step in a series of places the person seeking assistance has to go.

Practitioners, clients and students entering the world of labour market information have three tasks to complete together.

Accessing LMI To access the appropriate LMI for a client, two factors must first be determined. Where is the client willing to seek work (local community, province wide, Canada wide)? Is the LMI intended for use in an immediate job search, or for long-term career planning?

The practitioner will first help the client or student identify informational needs. These needs may revolve around job titles and occupational families, location, and costs of education and training programs, salaries and benefits, union or non-union memberships, standards and certification, geographical location of jobs, etc.

After the practitioner has guided the client or student in sorting out specific informational needs, sources for the answers have to be located. The practitioner will have some knowledge and information on hand and will also give ideas of where to go for tailor-made answers. Specific sources of labour market information are suggested at the end of each chapter in this book. A knowledge of which resources are best suited for certain information will enable practitioners to guide clients in their searches.

The third way the practitioner helps clients or students is to teach them to evaluate the gathered information. It is important to remember that statistics and projections are very useful guides; however, most labour market data are based on a sample representing a whole population. Error is a factor to consider and so is constant change due to policies, economics and human values. Up until recently, published data has often been outdated by the time it has become available to the public. However, up-to-date information is becoming more accessible to clients and practitioners due to electronic data gathering and reporting.

When a client or student moves on to the action role in the career decision-making process, he/she makes use of the information, for example, by enrolling in a program, becoming an apprentice, applying for a job, arranging for specialized training or moving to a geographical location where there are more opportunities.

The addition of labour market information to the process of career decision making encourages an additional set of questions beyond the in-depth analysis of personal aptitudes, values and interests, and the study of what job or occupation description best matches those personal interests and aptitudes. Clients and students should now incorporate certain questions into their career decision making.

• Does the present situation represent the future situation?
• What predictions are reliable?
• Where can I find further information to support or refute these predictions?
• Is a particular article biased to make an argument for a lobby group?
• How will consumer behaviour affect opportunities?
• What public policies will impinge on this career?
• How many workers are already in this field?
• How many new workers will be needed?
• How will technology change the industry?
• What are the paths that seem possible from this position?
• Is this occupation mobile across the country?
• From which training programs do employers prefer to hire? (Some questions are from Ettinger, 1991; Alfred, 1992.)

Basic research and analytical skills - including the ability to ask the right question to get information - are necessary for effective career decision making. Sometimes the language and statistics of labour market information can halt a person in her/his tracks because the information is unfamiliar. The following section examines some typical problem areas in using LMI and some ways to make sense of it.