We're actually doing a study looking at exactly that right now, funded by ESDC through their skills for success program. We're looking specifically at the barriers for employers in hiring students with disabilities, and a lot of the findings apply equally, of course, to persons with disabilities.
To answer that fundamental question, students with disabilities graduate on par with students across Canada, yet their employment rate drops significantly relative to the population. In our early explorations and in order to make sure employers are in line with that new legislation in federally regulated industries, we've identified several barriers that employers have at all stages of that onboarding procedure, from how they look to recruit people into the workplace to how they interview, how they onboard and then how they develop those people once they're in the workplace. The way we're looking at breaking that down is to identify particular interventions at each step.
I will come back to the skills articulation piece in terms of the early stages and helping students with disabilities understand those social and emotional skills, the resilience and the problem-solving that they've gone through because they are a student with a disability in and of itself. If they know how to talk about that and articulate their value and their perseverance, sometimes it helps employers understand the benefits and the immense value that persons with disabilities bring to the workplace.