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After sending out more than a dozen applications between January and April, Tia Chong still hasn’t found a summer position.
The 20-year-old Western University political science student says she was hoping to spend her summer working in research or communications. For now, she’s thinking of returning to a customer service job she originally landed in high school.
“That’s the backup if things don’t go as planned,” she says.
Ms. Chong says she and her peers seem to be having a harder time landing summer positions than her brother, who is six years older, did when he was the same age.
“He got an internship in his second year of university and he was just doing the regular things at school, like taking classes and joining a couple different clubs,” she says. “It’s a lot harder now than it was back then.”
Between a slowing economy, a declining job market and now artificial intelligence taking on tasks that once fell to entry-level workers, the summer of 2026 is proving a particularly challenging time for students looking to gain real-world experience during their time off.
According to Statistics Canada, unemployment among youth aged 15 to 24 rose half a per cent in April to 14.3 per cent, the highest level recorded outside of the pandemic and well above the pre-pandemic average of 10.8 per cent.
A recent analysis by hiring website Indeed found that postings for summer jobs edged up 4 per cent year-over-year in May after multiple years of sharp declines. Despite the slight uptick, demand for summer hires is down 36 per cent compared to 2022.
“The youth employment situation overall is quite weak,” says Brendon Bernard, a labour economist for Indeed. “It just fell off a cliff between early 2023 and the second half of 2024 and it’s been in a really weak state ever since.”
Leading up to that drop off, Mr. Bernard says demand for talent at all experience levels in the professional, scientific and technical services industries had been climbing for a decade and shot even higher after the pandemic eased.
“There was naturally going to be an end to this boom, but the event that sparked it was the rise in interest rates in early 2022, when we started to see hiring freezes across white-collar job sectors, and then we entered this new AI era when ChatGPT went public at the end of 2022,” he says. “We saw employer hiring appetite cool off, and that caused weaker employment conditions for lots of demographics, but the youth employment situation weakened more than we expected.”
Though AI has been blamed for layoffs across the knowledge economy, its effects have thus far been more acute at the lower end of the career ladder.
“A lot of the tasks that are performed by recent grads are tasks where AI has pretty incredible capabilities,” Mr. Bernard says.
The slowdown in student hiring in professional services, however, is also trickling down to sectors such as retail and food services, which disproportionately employ younger workers.
A s entry-level positions disappear from knowledge industry sectors, Mr. Bernard says some young people who would otherwise be working in office towers over the summer are instead spending those months serving in bars and restaurants and on retail floors. That, in turn, has increased unemployment among even younger workers whose first paycheques usually come from those front-line service industry roles.
“Accommodation and food services played a big role in the teenage employment rate decline, but for those in their early 20s, there was actually a slight uptick,” Mr. Bernard says. “Especially among recent university grads, who are struggling to find jobs in professional services and are working lower-paying service jobs instead.”
Iyi Adeniyi’s summer plans haven’t panned out. The 20-year-old electrical engineering student at McMaster University was hoping to land a position at a major utility or tech company.
Despite applying for more than 50 summer jobs, Ms. Adeniyi only got one interview and ultimately landed a position as an instructor at a science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM) camp.
“Clearly, there are fewer jobs, and it’s hard to differentiate yourself from people in the same program with similar grades,” says Ms. Adeniyi, who begins third year her of university in September. “When there is not much available, you’ve got to take what you can get.”
Those who land a top-tier position, according to Ms. Adeniyi, tend to either have exceptional resume points – such as starting a side project or business in their field – or connections.
“It’s like only those who have family members who already work in the industry are able to get jobs,” she says.
Though it’s just a temporary position, for students like Ms. Adeniyi landing a relevant summer job can have significant implications for their future careers. That’s especially true in today’s tight labour market, where an extra resume point can make a big difference.
“Trying to get as much experience over the summer when I have the time just seems really important,” she says. “It’s a very big factor in terms of what jobs I’m going to get post-grad.”