This report relies upon information collected by the OECD Policy Questionnaire ‘Career Guidance for Adults in Canada’, which focused on how career guidance is organised, funded, and provided. It was completed by Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) in June 2020. It was later distributed to provinces and territories through the Forum of Labour Market Ministers and the Council of Ministers of Education in Canada. Responses were provided by provincial employment and labour officials and/or provincial education officials in July and August 2021, as summarised in the table below.

This report uses data collected in the OECD 2020/2021 Survey of Career Guidance for Adults (SCGA). The SCGA was conducted to better understand adults’ experience with career guidance services and to improve international data on its use, coverage and inclusiveness. For Canada, the data collection and methodology differed from that of other countries that participated in the survey in certain respects.

In Canada, as elsewhere, the shares for urban areas are larger in the OECD 2020/2021 Survey of Career Guidance for Adults (SCGA) than in the actual population. The percentage of the sample living in urban areas was 87% in Canada, whereas only 82% of the actual Canadian population lives in urban areas. This is likely because people in rural areas tend to participate less in online surveys than those in urban areas, possibly due to lack of access to the internet or digital technologies. shows results from a simple sensitivity analysis where the use of career guidance within urban and rural areas is held fixed, while the share of adults in each group is adjusted to match the population. A weighted average is computed, multiplying the share of adults in each group by their use of career guidance, then summing up across the two groups. The results of the sensitivity analysis show that, all other things being equal, if the regional composition in the sample matched the actual regional composition in the population, the share of adults who used career guidance in the last five years would be 20.0%, negligibly lower than in the sample (20.3%). It suggests that over-representation in urban areas does not have a large impact on the accuracy of the overall findings.