Journal Article

Job loss is an involuntary disruptive life event with a far-reaching impact on workers' life trajectories. Its incidence among growing segments of the workforce, alongside the recent era of severe economic upheaval, has increased attention to the effects of job loss and unemployment. As a relatively exogenous labor market shock, the study of displacement enables robust estimates of associations between socioeconomic circumstances and life outcomes. Research suggests that displacement is associated with subsequent unemployment, long-term earnings losses, and lower job quality; declines in psychological and physical well-being; loss of psychosocial assets; social withdrawal; family disruption; and lower levels of children's attainment and well-being. Although reemployment mitigates some of the negative effects of job loss, it does not eliminate them. Contexts of widespread unemployment, although associated with larger economic losses, lessen the social-psychological impact of job loss. Future research should attend more fully to how the economic and social-psychological effects of displacement intersect and extend beyond displaced workers themselves.

Supported employment for people with severe mental illnesses is an evidence-based practice, based on converging findings from 4 studies of the conversion of day treatment to supported employment and 9 randomized controlled trials comparing supported employment to a variety of alternative approaches. These two lines of research suggest that between 40% and 60% of consumers enrolled in supported employment obtain competitive employment while less than 20% of similar consumers do so when not enrolled in supported employment. Consumers who hold competitive jobs for a sustained period of time show benefits such as improved self-esteem and better symptom control, although by itself, enrollment in supported employment has no systematic impact on nonvocational outcomes, either on undesirable outcomes, such as rehospitalization, or on valued outcomes, such as improved quality of life. The psychiatric rehabilitation field has achieved consensus on a core set of principles of supported employment, although efforts continue to develop enhancements. A review of the evidence suggests strong support for 4 of 7 principles of supported employment, while the evidence for the remaining 3 is relatively weak. Continued innovation and research on principles is recommended.

This study uses data from the 2005 Follow-up of Canadian Graduates - Class of 2000 - to look at the determinants of education-job match among university graduates. The question of education-job match is relevant given the substantial investment society puts into its postsecondary institutions and the role devoted to human capital in economic development. We find that 35.1% of graduates are in a job that is not closely related to their education 5 years after graduation. The education-job match strongly depends upon education characteristics, with fields that focus on providing specific skills for the job market (such as 'Health sciences' and 'Education') being associated with the highest likelihood of obtaining an education-job match. In addition, the level of education, good grades and time devoted to studying strongly affect the match. Employment characteristics also affect the match, but to a mixed extent. One of our main findings is that predetermined characteristics (age, gender and family background) do not significantly affect the match. However, immigrants are significantly disadvantaged even if they hold Canadian degrees.

Despite legislation on diversity in the workplace, people with disabilities still do not experience the same access to work opportunities as do their counterparts without disabilities. Many employers have been shown to harbor sincere yet ill-founded views about the work-related abilities of people with disabilities; these negative views are often a result of interrelated concerns that permeate the entire employment cycle. In this paper, we provide evidence-based responses to 11 specific concerns that employers have about people with disabilities, from pre-employment and entry experiences to the final dissolution of the employment relationship. At each stage of the employment cycle, we summarize and evaluate the relevant empirical evidence and provide recommendations for organizations committed to creating more effective, equitable, and inclusive workplaces for all individuals. We also suggest avenues for future research.

This paper examines the earnings returns to learning that takes place following the conventional 'school-to-work' stage of the life-course. We operationalise such 'lifelong learning' as the attainment of certified qualifications in adulthood, following the completion of the first period of continuous full-time education. Using data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) for the period 1991-2006, our approach and findings represent an important addition to the existing evidence base. By using annual data, we are able to employ the fixed effects estimator, which eliminates the problem of time-invariant unobserved heterogeneity. Our dynamic specification uses a lag structure to consider how earnings returns evolve in the medium and longer run, whilst also controlling for wage trends which were evident . prior to qualification attainment. Our results show a medium-run return for women of 10% on hourly wages. For men, initial suggestions of a similar positive return are eliminated once pre-qualification trends are taken into account. This suggests that adult learning has a causal effect on women's subsequent earnings but, for men, any apparent gain is due to selection.

Project-Based Learning (PBL) is an innovative approach to learning that teaches a multitude of strategies critical for success in the twenty-first century. Students drive their own learning through inquiry, as well as work collaboratively to research and create projects that reflect their knowledge. From gleaning new, viable technology skills, to becoming proficient communicators and advanced problem solvers, students benefit from this approach to instruction.

Many professional and skilled Canadian immigrants suffer from de‐skilling and the nonrecognition of their foreign credentials. Consequently, they are underrepresented in the upper segments of the Canadian labour market. Rather than accepting this devaluation of immigrant labour as a naturally occurring adjustment period, I suggest that regulatory institutions actively exclude immigrants from the upper segments of the labour market. In particular, professional associations and employers give preference to Canadian‐born and educated workers and deny immigrants access to the most highly desired occupations. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of institutionalised cultural capital and his views of the educational system as a site of social reproduction provide the entry point for my theoretical argument. I find that the nonrecognition of foreign credentials and dismissal of foreign work experience systematically excludes immigrant workers from the upper segments of the labour market. This finding is based on data from interviews with institutional administrators and employers in Greater Vancouver who service or employ immigrants from South Asia and the former Yugoslavia.

Human resource practitioners play a crucial role in promoting equitable treatment of persons with disabilities, and practitioner's decisions should be guided by solid evidence-based research. We offer a systematic review of the empirical research on the treatment of persons with disabilities in organizations, using Stone and Colella's seminal theoretical model of the factors influencing the treatment of persons with disabilities in work organizations, to ask: What does the available research reveal about workplace treatment of persons with disabilities, and what remains understudied? Our review of 88 empirical studies from management, rehabilitation, psychology, and sociology research highlights seven gaps and limitations in extant research: (a) implicit definitions of workplace treatment; (b) neglect of national context variation; (c) missing differentiation between disability populations; (d) overreliance on available data sets; (e) predominance of single-source, cross-sectional data; (f) neglect of individual differences and identities in the presence of disability; and (g) lack of specificity on underlying stigma processes. To support the development of more inclusive workplaces, we recommend increased research collaborations between human resource researchers and practitioners on the study of specific disabilities and contexts, and efforts to define and expand notions of treatment to capture more nuanced outcomes.