Older Canadians struggling to find work are being forced to take jobs traditionally reserved for students, pushing those younger people out of employment, according to a new CIBC World Markets report.

The job market hasn’t been strong enough to generate high quality work for older people, CIBC’s chief economist Avery Shenfeld wrote in the report, released Thursday. He said it’s among the reasons the jobless rate has climbed beyond 20 per cent for students 15 to 18 looking for part-time work.

“The lack of higher paying work has forced parents into taking the kind of employment previously reserved for teenage students,” Shenfeld said.

Karen Dorn, now 55, said a retail job was all she could find after countless interviews during an eight-month job search in 2010. “I didn’t really want to but I had bills to pay,” she said.

She had worked as a travel consultant for decades but took time off and eventually left her job when her mother was ill in 2002, she said. After being diagnosed with cancer herself, the Toronto woman said she was only able to return to work eight years later.

Most recently, she said, she had an office job. But the contract wasn’t extended when it ran out in March, which she says was due to her lacking computer skills.

She hasn’t heard back from any jobs she’s applied for since, she said. “I didn’t think I’d have that many problems finding a new job. I can’t find anything,” said Dorn, who recently resorted to applying to part-time retail jobs again.

Employment counselor Anne Brunelle, with Times Change Women’s Employment Service in Toronto, where Dorn goes for two hours a day to apply for jobs, said many older workers are stuck with “survival jobs” as their only options.

“They often feel badly when they end up having to take a job that would usually have gone to a high school or university student or college student. But they have to eat, too,” Brunelle said.

She said the agency has seen an increase in workers over 55 looking for that type of work in the last two years, as companies downsize and increase education requirements.

In his report, Shenfeld noted that student employment in that group’s traditional sectors, retail and food, has plunged for people under 19, while it’s climbed for people over 25.

Between 2007 and 2012, youth aged 15 to 18 working at a food counter or as kitchen help went down by 15.6 per cent, CIBC said. Jobs in those sectors for people 19 and over went up 31.2 per cent.

During those five years, youth retail jobs went down 23.9 per cent, while they went up 3.7 per cent for those over 19.

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Since 2007, CIBC notes, there’s been a 22 per cent drop in employment for the student-aged group. Missing out on a student job isn’t something that should be dismissed as “no big deal,” Shenfeld said.

“Student jobs are not just about being able to splurge for designer jeans,” he said. “For lower income, single parent households, those extra dollars can be material, and are a source of savings for higher education.”

Also on Thursday, the Conference Board of Canada said its Help-Wanted Index fell 7.9 percentage points in July, to 119.6.

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The pace of hiring in recent months has been slowed by soft domestic demand, which is expected to continue into the near term.

Drops in June and July mean employment numbers for August are expected to show a decline of 40,000 jobs, according to the Conference Board. In July, Ontario’s index fell 12.8 points, for a second consecutive decline.

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