The advice most graduates got - get the degree, apply widely, wait for the offer - stopped matching the market a while ago. On the latest episode of Real with Ritesh, "Building Career Momentum in Canada," I sat down with Dave Murray, a professional engineer and senior adviser at ICTC, to talk about what's actually happening to work right now. We covered Canada's youth unemployment crisis, why AI is both a productivity boost and a quiet threat to your thinking, the subsidy programs bridging school and real jobs, and why the skill nobody practices - networking - still moves careers more than a polished resume ever will. Here's the breakdown, the data behind it, and the full conversation.
- Youth unemployment in Canada hit 14.2% in June 2025 - roughly double the 6.9% national rate - and returning-student unemployment reached 17.4%, the worst June since 2009 outside the pandemic (Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey, July 2025)
- Early-career joblessness leaves a lasting mark: research on labour-market scarring finds wage losses of 10 to 15% that can persist for a decade or more (Future Skills Centre, 2025)
- Dave Murray's frame for AI: treat it like a junior analyst you manage - brief it clearly, check its work, iterate - because a 2025 study of 666 people found frequent AI users scored lower on critical thinking, with the heaviest dependence among 17-to-25-year-olds (Gerlich, 2025)
- Work-integrated learning subsidies like ICTC's WIL Digital cover 50 to 70% of a student's wage; about 70% of participants land full-time work after graduation and nearly a third are hired by their placement employer (ICTC, WIL Digital)
- Underemployment is the quieter crisis - around 41% of recent bachelor's graduates work in roles that don't require their degree - and networking, not mass applications, is what most reliably breaks the cycle (2025 National Graduates Survey; Real with Ritesh, August 2026)
Why "Just Apply Everywhere" Stopped Working
In June 2025, the unemployment rate for Canadians aged 15 to 24 sat at 14.2%, roughly double the 6.9% national rate and well above the pre-pandemic youth average of 10.8% (Statistics Canada, "Labour Force Survey, June 2025," July 2025). For students hunting summer work it was worse - a 17.4% rate that month, the highest June reading since 2009 outside the pandemic.
That gap is the backdrop for the whole conversation with Dave Murray. A young person today isn't lazy or unqualified - they're entering a market that's shed a big share of its entry-level openings while the number of graduates keeps climbing. Applying to 200 postings and hearing nothing back isn't a personal failure. It's what a broken funnel feels like from the inside.
Here's what most coverage of the "youth unemployment crisis" underplays: the damage doesn't end when the job finally arrives. Research on labour-market scarring finds that starting a career in a downturn drags wages down 10 to 15% for years, and the effect can last a decade or more (Future Skills Centre, "Long-Term Labour Market Scarring on Youth from Economic Shocks," 2025). A slow start compounds the same way a good one does, just in the wrong direction.
I see the employer side of this in my consulting work. Founders skip early-career hires because training feels like a cost they can't absorb in a tight year. Dave's argument, and mine, is that this is short-term math - the talent you don't develop now is the mid-level hire you can't find in three years, at a price you don't want to pay.
Using AI as a Junior Analyst, Not a Crutch
Dave Murray's cleanest frame from the episode: within a few years, nearly everyone will work with AI the way a manager works with a junior analyst (Real with Ritesh, "Building Career Momentum in Canada," August 2026). You write the brief, you review what comes back, you correct it, and you go again. The output is only as good as the direction and the scrutiny you bring to it.
That sounds like a productivity story, and it is. But there's a cost hiding in it. When AI does the first draft of your thinking every time, the muscle you'd normally use to structure a problem starts to weaken. The tool that makes you faster today can make you worse at the underlying skill tomorrow if you let it carry the whole load.
The research backs the worry. In a 2025 study of 666 participants, Michael Gerlich found that frequent AI users scored measurably lower on critical-thinking assessments, and the dependence was strongest among people aged 17 to 25 (Gerlich, "AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking," 2025). A separate study of 319 knowledge workers by Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon found the same pattern: the more someone trusted the AI, the less critical thinking they did on the task.
The way through isn't to avoid AI - it's to keep doing the hard first step yourself sometimes. Draft the outline before you ask for one. Form a hypothesis before you request the analysis. Use the tool to pressure-test your thinking, not to skip it. The people who'll manage AI well are the ones who can still tell when it's confidently wrong.
What Work-Integrated Learning Actually Fixes
The cleanest bridge between a classroom and a paycheck is a subsidized placement, and it's the core of what ICTC does. Its WIL Digital program covers 50% of a student's wage, up to $5,000, rising to 70% and up to $7,000 for underrepresented students, funded through the federal Student Work Placement Program (ICTC eTalent Canada, "Work Integrated Learning (WIL) Digital"). The subsidy exists to lower the risk that stops an employer from taking a chance on someone unproven.
It works. Roughly 70% of students who go through WIL Digital land full-time work after graduation, and nearly one-third are hired by the same employer that hosted their placement. A four-month term turns an abstract resume line into a colleague a manager already trusts.
Dave also described a newer model built for this moment: pairing a subsidized student with a small business and a subject-matter mentor to co-develop a real AI use case over 12 to 16 weeks. The company gets a low-risk way to test AI on an actual problem. The student gets hands-on experience that's genuinely scarce. Both learn the thing neither could safely learn alone.
That gap is wide. In Canada, only 12.2% of businesses reported using AI to produce goods or deliver services in mid-2025, even though that share had nearly quadrupled in a year (Statistics Canada, 2025), while a Microsoft survey found 71% of small and mid-sized firms now use AI or generative AI tools in some form (Microsoft, "Majority of Canadian Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Embrace AI," June 2025). The distance between "using a chatbot" and "AI in the core of the business" is exactly the ground a placement student can help cover.
Programs Dave Mentioned
| Program | Who it's for | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| WIL Digital | Post-secondary students and employers | Wage subsidy of 50–70% for digital-economy placements, bridging school and first jobs |
| AI co-learning placement | "AI-curious" small and mid-sized businesses | 12–16 week placement pairing a student and a mentor to build a real AI use case |
| Work Ready for Newcomers | Foreign-trained professionals on a PR pathway | Exposure to open-minded employers, plus community and networking support |
| Entrepreneurship programs | Early- and mid-career people considering a pivot | Idea validation and startup training through partners like Platform Calgary and Futurpreneur |
For the founder's side of that AI-adoption question - where it helps, where it doesn't, and what to fix first - I went deep on it in How Claude AI Is Transforming Business Workflows With Strategic Governance.
Networking Is the Skill Nobody Practices
Ask Dave Murray what actually moves a career and the answer isn't a certificate - it's relationships. Mass online applications have always had low response rates, and AI tools that let candidates apply in bulk are making the pile deeper and the odds worse. Meanwhile, a warm introduction still routes around the whole queue.
So why does almost everyone still lead with the online form? Because it feels like progress. The catch is that most people network badly too - they show up only when they need something, ask for a favour, and disappear. Dave's version is the opposite: consistent, low-stakes contact when you don't need anything - commenting on someone's work, sharing something useful, showing up to the same events - so that the relationship is real before you ever have an ask.
This podcast is a networking strategy in disguise. Most of the guests came from a genuine conversation months before there was ever a recording. When I meet a founder now, I'm not thinking about what they can do for me this quarter - I'm thinking about whether this is someone I want in my circle for the next ten years. The opportunities show up later, and they show up unprompted.
Personal branding gets dismissed as vanity, but for a job seeker it's just networking that scales. A consistent, honest presence on LinkedIn means a hiring manager has already seen how you think before your application lands. You're not a stranger with a resume - you're a name they recognize. That head start is hard to overstate in a market this crowded.
Working on Something That Changes How People Build Careers?
If you're building programs, tools, or businesses that help people navigate work in the age of AI - or you've lived a career pivot worth unpacking - I'd like to hear it on Real with Ritesh. Book a discovery call and let's see if it's a fit for the show.
Book a Podcast Discovery Call →Reinvention Is the New Baseline
Underemployment is the crisis that gets less airtime than unemployment, and it may be bigger. Around 41% of recent bachelor's graduates in Canada are working in jobs that don't require their degree, according to the 2025 National Graduates Survey - people who cleared every hurdle and still landed below their training (CERIC CareerWise, September 2025). The trap is that a survival job eats the time and energy you'd need to climb out of it.
Dave's answer isn't a single leap, it's a posture. Keep a rough north star - a direction you're testing toward - but stay open to the sideways opportunity you didn't plan for. Careers now get rebuilt more than once, and the people who handle that well treat learning as a permanent line item, not a phase that ended at graduation.
Volunteering and short placements are how you buy experience when nobody will sell you a job. Dave was honest about the limit there too: unpaid work assumes you can afford to do it, and plenty of people can't. That's exactly where mentors, coaches, and advocates matter - someone with a bit of leverage opening a door that a cold application never would.
The reinvention advice sounds soft until you notice it's the same advice for founders. A business pivots when the market shifts under it. A career is no different now - the shift just used to be slow enough that one set of skills lasted 40 years. It doesn't anymore, and pretending otherwise is the real risk.
For the version of this aimed squarely at founders and operators, see Skills Every Founder Is Getting Wrong Right Now, and for the mindset shift behind leaving a stable job to build, From Employee to Entrepreneur.
Frequently Asked Questions
How high is youth unemployment in Canada right now?
The unemployment rate for Canadians aged 15 to 24 was 14.2% in June 2025, roughly double the national rate of 6.9% and well above the pre-pandemic youth average of 10.8%. For returning students specifically, the June 2025 rate reached 17.4%, the highest for that month since 2009 outside the pandemic (Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey, July 2025).
What does it mean to use AI as a junior analyst?
Dave Murray's framing is that most people will soon manage AI the way a team lead manages a capable but inexperienced hire: you write a clear brief, review the output, correct it, and iterate. The skill that matters isn't typing a prompt, it's the judgment to spot when the answer is confident and wrong (Real with Ritesh, August 2026).
Does relying on AI hurt your critical thinking?
It can, when it replaces the effort instead of supporting it. A 2025 study of 666 people by Michael Gerlich found frequent AI users scored lower on critical-thinking assessments, with the strongest dependence among people aged 17 to 25. A separate Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon study of 319 knowledge workers found higher trust in AI was linked to less critical thinking during tasks.
How does work-integrated learning help students get hired?
Programs like ICTC's WIL Digital cover 50% of a student's wage, up to $5,000, or 70% and up to $7,000 for underrepresented students, funded by the federal Student Work Placement Program. About 70% of participating students land full-time work after graduation and nearly one-third are hired by the employer that hosted their placement (ICTC, WIL Digital).
Is networking really more effective than applying online?
For most roles, yes. Mass online applications have low response rates and are getting worse as AI tools let candidates apply in bulk. Dave Murray's point is that relationship-based networking, consistent visibility on LinkedIn, and in-person events put a name and a face in front of a hiring manager before a job is even posted (Real with Ritesh, August 2026).
The through-line in everything Dave Murray said is that the job market rewards a different set of moves now than the one most of us were coached for. The degree still matters. It just isn't the finish line anymore - it's the entry fee for a game that keeps changing rules.
What compounds instead is the stuff that feels indirect: keeping your own thinking sharp while you use AI, getting real experience through a placement, and building relationships years before you need them.
If you're building something in this space, or you want your career-pivot story in front of this audience, book a podcast discovery call or reach out directly.
Sources
- Real with Ritesh, Building Career Momentum in Canada | Dave Murray on Skills, Opportunity & the Future of Work (source episode for this article), retrieved 2026-08-31, August 2026
- Statistics Canada, Labour Force Survey, June 2025, retrieved 2026-08-31, July 11, 2025
- Future Skills Centre, Long-Term Labour Market Scarring on Youth from Economic Shocks, retrieved 2026-08-31
- Michael Gerlich, AI Tools in Society: Impacts on Cognitive Offloading and the Future of Critical Thinking (Societies, 2025), retrieved 2026-08-31
- ICTC / eTalent Canada, Work Integrated Learning (WIL) Digital, retrieved 2026-08-31
- Microsoft, Majority of Canadian Small and Medium-Sized Businesses Embrace AI, retrieved 2026-08-31, June 25, 2025
- CERIC CareerWise, Underemployment Among Graduates: Addressing a Critical Career Issue, retrieved 2026-08-31, September 12, 2025
