Venture Kamloops study provides benchmarks on region’s labour market data

A year-long study into the Kamloops region’s labour market provides an important benchmark for what’s going on, but doesn’t offer much in the way of surprises for Sun Peaks.
There were 565 employers — including 58 from Sun Peaks — representing 792 establishments who responded to the Venture Kamloops survey that gathered detailed information on the current labour situation as well as projecting needs for the next 10 years.
The areas covered extended from Merritt in the south to McBride in the north, Chase in the east and 100 Mile House in the west.
According to Venture Kamloops, data specific to this region is vital for labour demand planning and will be useful to labour market analysts, economists, consultants, planners, forecasters and academics in both the private and public sector.
“Before we can take steps to address issues in our labour market, we needed to quantify what it looked like,” said Colin O’Leary, Venture Kamloops’ manager of business retention and expansion.
“We were hearing there was a skilled labour shortage, but I was also hearing there was no labour shortage; it was all anecdotal. Because it wasn’t quantified for our region, it was hard to come up with strategies.”
The key regional findings noted:
• employers will require “significant” numbers of new hires in the next 10 years,
• a large number of new hires will require post-secondary education,
• there is a lack of candidates to fill skilled trades and engineering positions,
• planned capital projects, like the twinning of the Kinder Morgan pipeline, will further increase the labour supply shortage and
• employers in smaller communities need access to training and professionals to meet labour demand.
A breakout of Sun Peaks’ labour market illustrates just how different the employment situation is from nearby areas.
For 2015, the study categorized 60.3 per cent of the jobs in the resort municipality as low-skilled, 5.6 per cent as semi-skilled, 15.2 per cent skilled/trades, 11 per cent professional/technical and eight per cent management. The figures remained stable in projections over the next decade.
To contrast, in Kamloops, only 27.8 per cent of the jobs were classified as low-skilled, 22 per cent as semi-skilled, 19.3 per cent as skilled/trades, 20.3 per cent professional/technical and 10.6 per cent as management.
It’s not a shortage of skilled labour that’s an issue at Sun Peaks but the challenge of attracting employees overall for the seasonal nature of the work, says Darcy Alexander, the general manager of Sun Peaks Resort LLP (SPR).
“Like agriculture, tourism is a seasonal business with our busiest season being winter. You need skilled people, say ski instructors, cooks and other positions that you need for four to six months at a time,” he said.
“The problem becomes that you can’t get a person to move away from their family for that period of time.”
Changes to the temporary foreign worker program were also a blow, he acknowledged, making the federal program “unusable for most of the tourism industry” as a way of finding staff.
The resort does make use of other programs, he said, like International Experience Canada, which allows young Canadians to work abroad and young people from partner countries to come here and work temporarily.
As for other recruitment strategies, it’s not always about dollar compensation, Alexander said, “but how well trained you are, having a place to work that is enjoyable.”
One of the perks they offer staff — a free ski pass — gives the resort a leg up over some other businesses in recruiting employees but is also standard within the mountain resort industry, he said.
SPR was recognized for its efforts to be a good employer with the Employees First Award at October’s B.C. Tourism Awards Gala.
Other unique challenges facing Sun Peaks’ employers are limited staff housing and the 45-minute commute from Kamloops, matters the regional study did not touch on but ones businesses are all too familiar with.
“I didn’t see any mention of transportation in the (Venture Kamloops) study, but that would be an opportunity for Sun Peaks and I would presume other smaller communities outside Kamloops would feel the same,” said Christopher Nicolson, president of Tourism Sun Peaks.
While the Venture Kamloops study does not touch on next steps, it does recommend developing economic development strategies on a regional level. Nicolson suggested that Tourism Sun Peaks is already involved as a ski area association and tourism association in communicating with government, but the study does present opportunities for the area’s rural communities to align themselves on common labour challenges.
The 63-page Venture Kamloops Labour Market Study can be found at www.venturekamloops.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/VK-LMP-Report-November-4-2015.pdf