Many Canadians Look For Help When It Comes To Career Planning

Toronto, ON - According to a new Ipsos Reid survey conducted on behalf of the Canadian Education and Research Institute for Counselling (CERIC), one in ten (8%) Canadians have required assistance in making career plans or in selecting, changing, or getting a job, over the past year.

And among those who received career planning assistance in the past year, while a good majority of seven in ten (71%) say that it was useful, a substantial minority (27%) feel it was not.

So where are Canadians most likely to seek out career planning help or advice? Majorities of Canadians point to "relatives/friends/neighbours" (68%), "co-worker/associate" (67%), or "newspapers" (67%). But fully half of Canadians also point to a number of other potential career planning assistance resources, including a "career specialist or counsellor in an educational setting" (47%).

If they were to start again to plan their career or work-life, two-thirds (65%) would try to get more career planning or job information than they did initially.

These are the findings of an Ipsos Reid poll conducted for CERIC fielded from January 10th to January 12th, 2005. For the survey, a representative sample of 1000 adult Canadians were interviewed by telephone. The sample used in this study has been weighted according to Census data to accurately reflect the general adult population of Canada. With a sample of this size, the aggregate results are considered accurate to within 1773.1 percentage points, 19 times out of 20, of what they would have been had the entire adult population of Canada been polled. The margin of error will be larger within each sub-grouping of the survey population.
Please open the attached PDF to view the factum and detailed tables.

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For more information on this news release, please contact:

Paul Orovan
Ipsos-Reid Public Affairs
(416) 324-2900