Employment Experiences and Psychometric Tools
We also explore the employment experiences of individuals from diverse backgrounds and develop psychometric tools as needed.
Indigenous Communities
Colonization and assimilation by European settlers created serious and long-lasting impacts for Indigenous communities, such as a job market transformation. Employment has been found to be beneficial towards people’s physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health. However, employment experiences in Indigenous communities are complex and deserve to be better understood.
Focus groups will be conducted to gain a greater understanding of the employment experiences of individuals from Indigenous communities.
Intersectionality
The intersectionality framework suggests that the combination of multiple marginalized characteristics and social positions can lead to intersectional discriminatory experiences that are greater than the sum of their parts.
An upcoming research project will take an intersectionality approach to understand how individuals' employment experiences are influenced by the convergence of their multiple social identities.
Psychometric Tool on Future Workplace Skills
Modern society sees disparities between an individual's skills and skills that companies require for a specific position, leading to a labor market with more vacant positions than individuals willing and having the skillset to occupy them. Thus, it is important for employability counselors to understand the existing work-related skills of unemployed individuals to better assist and support their clients to reintegrate the job market.
An assessment tool has been developed in the lab to acquire a more comprehensive assessment of an individual's work-related skills to better assist employability counselors in supporting their clients. The validity and reliability of the tool is currently being tested.