Last night the Windsor Star Cafe hosted the #WorkWindsor panel discussion which brought employers, service providers and young people together to discuss what young people can do to find employment in Windsor-Essex. Overall the discussion was great and I complement Dan Brown of YNKOT and Yvonne Pilion of WE-Tech for putting together an excellent event.

While the panel discussed the various issues of young people branding themselves, networking, finding mentors and how who you know is better than what you know, a question occurred to me. Given my propensity of macro level evaluation the question really didn’t suit being asked in the forum setting, so I have decided to ask it here!

1) In the Fall of 2014, 3,191 students enrolled full time first year classes at the University of Windsor. Of those students only were in 407 Engineering and 117 Computer Science students (which were fields represented by employers on the panel). This leaves approximately 2,500 students of which 1,254 are enrolled in the so called “soft subjects” of the Arts and Humanities. Given these tweets that emerged during the discussion:

This disconnect between where students are and what jobs are available in Windsor-Essex how do we reconcile this? In 4 years approximately 1,250 students will emerge with plenty of research and soft skills but few jobs available. Should they just abandon their potential career paths, plunge into additional schooling to gain some hard skills or should we/they accept that Windsor may not be the place for them after they graduate?

I hope that the panelists have a chance to respond either here or on twitter!