Phillip S. Jarvis
What 50 Years of Career and Workforce
Development Leadership Have Taught Me
PHIL JARVIS
Career Development
Pioneer & Champion
Hello, I'm Phil Jarvis.
Canada ranks among the world's leading countries in academic performance according to OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). However, for the first time, the OECD has included career readiness in PISA 2025, and Canada ranks significantly lower on this assessment. See the Career Readiness Dashboard. The report shows that across OECD countries, students are now expressing very high levels of career uncertainty and confusion. Job expectations have changed little since 2000 and bear little relationship to actual patterns of labour market demand, including in working areas of high strategic importance. Here's the OECD's Report on Teenage Career Readiness.
Career Conversations
"Something special happens when students engage with people in work. It is a form of social capital. Students gain the opportunity to access information and advice about the world of work in ways that are especially trustworthy and relevant. It enables young people to envision new potential futures for themselves and to challenge stereotypical ideas about the types of people suited for different professions. As the saying goes, if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. Employer engagement also provides students with opportunities to develop new long-term relationships, leading to recommendations or job offers. Effective guidance demands extensive student engagement with workplaces and people at work." Andreas Schleicher, OECD Director for Education and Skills.
These days, I'm focused on:
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Career Conversations. Ontario is investing millions again in 2025-26 to organize career conversations with adults working in in-demand jobs in their region for all Grade 9 and 10 students. The Ministry of Education selected the Halton Industry Education Council to coordinate this unprecedented initiative through Ontario Career Lab. As an honorary HIEC team member, I'm helping strategize how career coaches working in high-demand economic sectors will complement the work of guidance teacher-counsellors, community organizations, and parents for over 300,000 students.
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Co-hosting and curating HIEC's Parents as Career Coaches Podcast. Throughout my career, educators have lamented the difficulty of getting parents engaged in their children's education and career development. With inspiring and engaging guests and free online resources, we provide parents with the motivation and practical tools to engage more with their children in purposeful career conversations.
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I recently launched Career Callings, a free online resource to help youth and adults discover their purpose by exploring ways they are called to make the world better, using the UN Global Goals. I encourage you to try Career Callings and share the link with your networks. "Callings are urgings from the deep self that tell us what it will take to make our lives literally 'come true.” They point us toward awakenings, course corrections, and powerful authenticity." Gregg Levoy, Callings
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I'm also writing The Missing Bridge: Why so Many Young People Struggle to Transition from School to Meaningful Work. This is a book for everyone who cares about the future of their country: parents, educators, employers, community leaders, policymakers, career development professionals, and citizens alike. The book argues that a nation's greatest resource is not its land, minerals, technology, or financial capital. It is the imagination, character, talents, and aspirations of its people. Yet Canada and many other countries still lack the public infrastructure needed to help young people discover, develop, and apply those gifts throughout their lives. Career development is the missing bridge between education, meaningful work, thriving communities, and national prosperity.
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At a time of rapid technological change, artificial intelligence, demographic shifts, labour shortages, and increasing global competition, the book makes the case that career development should be recognized as essential public infrastructure, and introduced early, available to everyone, and intentionally governed as a long-term nation-building strategy. When young people develop career agency, they are better able to navigate uncertainty, contribute their talents, build fulfilling lives, and strengthen the resilience and productivity of their communities and their country.
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Drawing on more than five decades of national and international leadership in career and workforce development—and lessons learned from initiatives such as CHOICES, The Real Game Series, Canada WorkinfoNET, and the Blueprint for Life/Work Designs—the book presents a practical and optimistic roadmap for mobilizing human potential. It challenges governments, schools, employers, families, and communities to work together to ensure that every young person can imagine a meaningful future and take confident steps toward it.
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If we can build roads, hospitals, and digital networks to support our economies, we can also build the human infrastructure that helps every citizen discover where they can contribute most. Nations are ultimately built from the imagination, character, and talents of their people—the only natural resource that becomes more valuable the more we invest in it.
Check out some of my past Projects. I make periodic Blog and LinkedIn posts highlighting ideas and initiatives I consider transformational. If I can support your mission with speaking, advising, or consulting, Contact Me.
EMPOWERING STUDENTS
TO CREATE A BETTER WORLD
Every child possesses the most remarkable, renewable, expandable, natural resource on the planet – a human brain – with limitless capacity for wonder, imagination, creativity, empathy, and love.
Children haven’t yet fully accepted boundaries of convention, convenience, prejudice, hate, or inertia to which many adults have surrendered. Once they find their purpose, every child has the potential for prodigious accomplishments in any field she or he cares deeply enough about.
Rather than marks and grades, if public education focused on igniting and channeling students’ sense of purpose, wonder, innocence, justice, creativity, hope, and unbounded potential, in less than a generation the world will be kinder, more equitable, and healthier in every sense.
We face big challenges in today’s world: poverty, hunger, inequality, species extinction, homelessness, tribalism, and climate change are just some of the issues we need to address urgently.
Big challenges need bold action, and that is where the Global Goals come in. They are agreed to by all world leaders to build a greener, fairer, better world, and we all have a role to play in achieving them.
There are 17 Goals and many positive actions you can take. So which should you focus on? Here's a quiz to help you discover that three Goals that are most important to and things you can start doing today to make a difference.
All Videos
All Videos
Thoughtexchange Virtual Event. Helping Students Find Their WHY.
Thoughtexchange Virtual Event. Reimagining Education.
Harvard Pathways to Prosperity Conference Action
Testimonials
I have known Phil Jarvis and his work for nearly four decades, beginning with my early involvement in the CHOICES computerized career guidance system in the mid-1980s. Over that time, I have worked with Phil in more roles than LinkedIn can reasonably categorize.
Phil is a legend in Canadian—and global—career development. Few people have done more to help young people move from imagining futures to actually enacting them. His vision is consistently practical, community-infused, and grounded in real labour-market realities.
It would be impossible to catalogue Phil’s full list of contributions here, but I can say this without hesitation: he is one of the five most trusted career development leaders I know anywhere in the world—and I am not an easy marker.
Kris Magnusson,
Dean, Faculty of Education at Simon Fraser University
