Labour Market Information

The best way to find out about jobs available worldwide or in your neighbourhood is to do research. If you don’t take a proactive stance and perform the research yourself, you will only ever learn of jobs that other people think might suit you. As someone who is blind or partially sighted, you know that most sighted people have a very limited understanding of what you can do. This is particularly obvious in the world of work. If you ask most sighted people what jobs blind or partially sighted people can do, they will struggle to come up with even a few things – almost all stereotypical: singer, musician, customer service representative, assembly worker, crafts worker, etc. You need to know what jobs are available and then you can decide whether they suit you or if you can do them.

Start by researching information about the labour market in general and gradually narrow your search to specific jobs. If you have access to the internet, you can do a web search using keywords such as “jobs in Canada” or “jobs in Toronto” (or whatever location you’re interested in). To capture more general information, enter broader keywords such as “labour market” plus the applicable province/state or country.

If you don’t have easy access to the internet, go to your local public library and ask the librarian to search for you. If you do this, write out the keywords you’d like the librarian to search. If you don’t have easy access to a community library, you may want to reach out to a librarian at a special library for people who are blind or partially sighted and ask for materials (braille, print, audio, or electronic) that describe the labour market where you live or to where you are interested in relocating.

If you don’t have a specific job title in mind, search for labour market information in general and read about the jobs that are available in significant numbers and that are not in decline. Once you have specific jobs or a career field in mind, search for labour market information and jobs using the job titles or career field in your search. For example, you might search for “school counsellor positions in province/state or country” or “computer analyst jobs in province/state or country”.

Here’s a list of the information you’ll want to gather in your labour market research:

The salary ranges for workers in the geographic areas where you want to work and career fields you’re interested in.
The qualifications (licences or certificates, education or training, and experience) required.
The employers in your geographic area hiring for those positions.
The requirements needed, such as:

essential duties
proportion of time allocated to common tasks workers perform
where the work occurs (indoors, outdoors)
with whom workers interact (public, clients, small or large groups of coworkers, alone)
tools used on the job
benefits that are commonly available

To complete the career exploration process, you’ll need to compare your attributes to the requirements for workers doing the type of work that you want to do (your job analyses). This comparative process is known as matching one’s self to jobs. You can read all about the technique in the section The right job for you.