BARNSTABLE – Cape Cod Young Professionals has released an Executive Summary of Compiled Results from the organization’s recent COVID-19 Needs Survey.
The goal of the survey was to collect data regarding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic specifically among Cape Cod’s young, working-age adult community, from ages 18 to 45.
The survey was available at the CCYP website for four weeks from April 17 through May 18.
“The most stand-out pieces of information we gathered from the survey really was just the scope of the impact of the pandemic on the region’s young workforce,” said Lauren Barker, CEO of Cape Cod Young Professionals.
“About 85 percent of the survey respondents said that they had been directly impacted. Keep in mind, this was mid-April to mid-May, so we do expect that this number has gone up since then,” said Barker.
Thirty-three percent rated the impacts they have experienced as highly severe or severe in nature, and 45 percent reported a decrease in productivity at work, due to having to quickly switch to remote working, juggling home and family responsibilities, and other challenges.
Twenty-six percent of the respondents had experienced a temporary loss of employment, such as furlough, while another 20 percent reported a cut in hours.
Twenty-five percent lost child care, and the need for child care came up as a significant challenge both during the pandemic and looking ahead to the reopening process.
The open-ended responses portion of the survey showed mental health concerns such as stress, depression, and anxiety among participants.
“There’s just a lot coming at this age group all at once and not a lot of support system left to remedy or mitigate that. One of the things that we are wanting to do is raise awareness that this is an ongoing thing that we’re going to be finding as the economy opens back up and workers start to go back to work. There are going to continue to be issues with this,” said Barker.
CCYP said that it will use the data to inform policies and activities within the organization going forward.
“We’ve introduced some new services and program as a result of this survey, already. One of which is a laser-focused coaching program that’s available for free to our members and for just a small suggested donation for non-members,” said Barker.
“What that program does is provides free, thirty minute, one-to-one coaching sessions to help people understand and navigate what their next steps will be, whether those are down to a personal or professional issue.”
Barker also said that a consistency in connection is important to alleviate some of the problems the young work force is seeing as a result of the coronavirus.
The CCYP has introduced multiple new services alongside the coaching sessions in order to create more connections, including creating a new job board.
“We’ve introduced a new job board membership that provides support to our region’s employers if they’re looking to fill a position. So if they’re not ready to sign up for a full membership with CCYP, they can sign up to just get access to our job board, which is a really unique job board in that it targets specially Cape Cod. We only feature Cape Cod employers and jobs on that board, so it’s a great way to reach our local workforce.”
The summary can be found in its entirety on the CCYP website.
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