Assignment:
YOUR ESSAY SHOULD INCLUDE:
a) An overview of the sector, industry, or occupation
• Size - total number of employees, number of employers, size of employers
• Range of possible jobs
• Public or private sector, primary or secondary labour market, secure or precarious, unionized or not...
b) Details about the position you are seeking:
• What is involved -- a description of what the job entails
• Qualifications required
• Wages, benefits, working conditions
• Supply of competing candidates
• Demand -- how many jobs are on offer each year?
c) How your career prospects are being affected by economic, social or political trends affecting the sector, industry, or occupation [THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT SECTION]
• Structural and cyclical changes - eg. free trade / globalization, neo-liberalism, the recent recession, increasing competition, outsourcing, technological change, climate change, etc;
• Changing consumer taste / results of marketing.
• Changing political climate - increased /reduced resources or budgets
d) Overall assessment - your conclusions
• Is there an opportunity for me to make a contribution?
• Is this job a good match with my personality?
• Can I make a living somehow?
• Are there other benefits - travel, power, friendship...
e) Bibliography (without annotations)
• List the sources in alphabetical order
• Bibliographies should be single spaced.
• Any interviews you do should be listed in your bibliography: Eg. Personal interview with Daniel Johnson, Supervisor of Staff Training, National Institute of Mental Health, Oxford, Ontario, February 23, 2010.
WHERE YOU CAN FIND RELEVANT INFORMATION
Working in Canada - The Working in Canada Web site provides job seekers, workers and those who are new to the Canadian labour market with the information required to make informed decisions about where to live and work. The site can assist individuals who are searching for work or looking to make career decisions.
Working in Canada.gc.ca is the Government of Canada's leading source for labour market information. It offers users, free and authoritative occupational and career information such as educational requirements, main duties, wage rates and salaries, current employment trends and outlooks.
Reference Government Documents
Professional associations or unions representing those working in your field.
Going Global. This is another online resource the Career Centre pays a fee to use so that all York students can have access to it through our site (the link is in the same place as Career Cruising, above). The information is primarily about overseas opportunities but if any of your students are considering international employment they might find a few interesting bits & pieces on this site. It's primarily an opportunity posting board but there are a lot of country, company and occupation profiles, along with a variety of articles that might be useful.
Statistics Canada (www.statscan.gc.ca) has a variety of labour statistics in their "Labour" section and students can access reports on things like commuting, globalization & the labour market, wages & salaries, post-secondary field of study and labour market outcomes, etc.
Job Bank (www.jobbank.gc.ca) is another federal government site with job information. The part that would likely be of most use to your students would be the "Career Navigator" section. There's a "Career Exploration" area within that section with a variety of resources for researching occupations and I believe it may include some labour market outlooks.
Human Resources & Skills Development Canada (www.hrsdc.gc.ca) is a great site for researching occupations. The most important section of the site is the NOC (National Occupation Classifications). If students go to the NOC part of the site and use the "NOC Code List" they can view a menu of the different occupational sectors in Canada with labour market information about the multitude of positions in each sector.
Outline for research essay (part A and B) The rest of the essay should be in continuation of this.
My research is on being a lawyer. I want to be a lawyer because I want to be able to save innocent people from going to jail for crimes they did not commit and also to put dangerous people in the society behind bars.
Some of the things I will be researching in this essay are
• the challenges of becoming a lawyer
• the chances of getting a job after going to law school
• wage given to lawyers
• The possibility of a lawyer having his or her own firm
• Qualifications for becoming a lawyer
• The working conditions of lawyers
• Demands for lawyers in Canada
• The position of lawyers in Canada
• The contributions lawyers can make in the society
• The structure of a firm and what is being carried out in a firm
• How a law court operates and the rules that takes place in a law court
• The process of becoming a judge if one wants to go further
• If lawyers do more of a private practice than public practice
More reasons why I want to study law
• To bring fairness to people
• To help those who are being oppressed and do not have the funds to pay a lawyer get justice
• It fits the argumentative personality that I have