(Montreal) The COVID-19 pandemic has caused large numbers of people to abandon their routine service and manual jobs to seek jobs in the technical, professional and management professions.
Statistics Canada on Wednesday unveiled a survey titled “The Changing Nature of Work Since the Beginning of the COVID-19 Pandemic” which shows that the labor market trend of migrating to professional positions, which had already been present for decades, accelerated during the pandemic.
However, the drop in the services sector during the pandemic represents the only reversal in trend since it came after a moderate but constant increase in previous years.
Health and robotization
Report author Marc Frenette notes that the pandemic and containment measures “have raised many economic and health concerns for workers and employers. […] Workers may have sought employment with less face-to-face contact with people, such as professional jobs, which can often be done from home during lockdown,” he suggests.
At the same time, due to impacts on the supply chain among others, “employers may have attempted to make their production and delivery processes more resilient in the event of a future lockdown. It is about automating tasks, since machines, robots and computer algorithms are not vulnerable to biological viruses.” Investments in robots are said to have accelerated during the pandemic.
The trend is not new. From 1987 to 2019, the proportion of employees working in occupations related to production, trades, repair and execution (which involve routine manual tasks) fell from 29.5% to 21, 8%. During these three decades, the proportion of employees who held positions in technical, professional and managerial occupations (which involve non-routine cognitive tasks) increased from 23.7% to 32.3%. Meanwhile, the proportions remained relatively stable in the service sector and in sales, office work and administrative support.
The increase in the proportion of positions in the technical, liberal and management professions as well as the parallel decline in the manual trades between 2019 and 2022 therefore represent a marked acceleration of the trend.
Fall in services
As for the health concern, it should come as no surprise that the pandemic years have seen a decline in occupations in the service sector. “The decline in occupations in the service sector has been particularly notable, especially since the share of service sector employment has increased moderately in the three decades preceding the pandemic,” the analyst points out.
Unsurprisingly, this movement illustrates a difference between men and women that emanates from what is often called the traditional professions of each other. Thus, although the increase noted in technical, professional and management occupations was similar for men and women, the declines did not occur in the same places. For men, the decline was more significant in occupations related to production, trades, repair and execution, while for women, it was rather the service sector that experienced the steepest decline.
Young people: even stronger migration
Finally, the data by age group is very revealing. The rise in technical, professional and managerial occupations and the decline in service-sector occupations were significantly more pronounced among younger workers (25 to 34 years old) than among older workers (45 to 54 years old). If we take into account the fact that young people often occupy, at their beginnings on the labor market, jobs in the service sector and that these were clearly more at risk for health during the pandemic, migration more of young people towards jobs less exposed to the public can be explained quite easily.
Marc Frenette is careful not to attempt to predict the future based on these differences between age groups. He writes, however, that “trends by age group can provide insight into future trends.”
“The growing demand for positions in technical, professional and managerial occupations may be more easily met by younger workers, whose human capital may be more malleable. In other words, younger workers may be in a better position to make a turn because they generally have fewer family responsibilities that prevent them from returning to school and they have more years to recoup their investments. »
