Job shortage and forest industry is no longer a contradiction in terms as far as MaryAnne Arcand is concerned.
The executive director of the Central Interior Logging Association (CILA) was driving along Highway 97 back up to Prince George one Saturday and noticed an abundance of "help wanted" signs.
"Especially in Quesnel where the logging shops are right along the highway there, signs everywhere," Arcand said, adding she's noticed similar trends in the help wanted ads online and in the newspapers.
The challenge is to find people ready to step in with a minimum of on-the-job training and to that end, Arcand, with the support of logging and trucking companies, sawmill and pulpmill operators and the College of New Caledonia, is developing a program to answer that need.
Dubbed Forest Industry Resource Skills Training (FIRST), the proposal is a 12-week program that ends with "real time, on the ground training in an active logging show."
It would act as a finishing school for those who've earned the qualifications to drive a logging truck or operate a feller-buncher but lack the practical experience.
"Obviously, December to March is crazy time and nobody really has the time to mentor them so what we're trying to do is get that piece done in the late-summer, early-fall while it's still kind of the slack time," Arcand said.
"In the winter, we need 100 per cent production out of those machines and you can't afford to have a guy sitting on there at 20, 30, 40 per cent slowly building up, so the idea would be that you'd have him coming in at 75, 80 per cent ready and then build up over the season."
Last winter, 90 per cent of CILA members were affected by driver shortages and 80 per cent by equipment operator shortages. One member got only 60 per cent use of its trucks because there were so few drivers.
"And he was one of the better paying," Arcand commented, and added it's the same situation for chip hauling.
"It's an ironic thing," Arcand said. "We've got all this market in China, we've got all these biomass plants coming on stream and we can't get the logs to them."
The initiative comes as the provincial government is putting the final touches on a jobs agenda to be rolled out this month, targeting specific industries with skills training, niche-marketing programs and tax incentives.
B.C. jobs, tourism and innovation minister Pat Bell was reluctant to reveal much detail but did say it's a sectoral approach that focuses on the province's natural assets.
"It's brand new, it's innovative, it's something people have been advocating for historically but it's not something that any government that I'm aware of has ever done," Bell said.
