With $34 billion worth of projects likely to be pursued in northern B.C. over the coming decade, there will be a major need for skilled labour, Industry Training Authority chief executive officer Kevin Evans warned Thursday.
"The nightmare scenario we are trying to avoid is high unemployment in the north combined with a skills shortage and with all the projects coming online, that is a very real possibility," Evans said when speaking at the B.C. Natural Resource Forum
Between the projects and growth in retirements as the workforce ages, there will be openings for 3,210 jobs in trades occupations in the Cariboo economic region, which stretches from 100 Mile House to Prince George and east to Valemount, between 2010 and 2020.
Machinery and transportation equipment mechanics lead the list at 740 openings, followed by chefs and cooks at 540 and automotive service technicians at 480
openings.
Tapping into northern B.C.'s aboriginal population will give the region a "tremendous competitive" advantage, said Evans, who added strategies are being implemented to prepare them for the trades.
Encouraging more women to enter the trades is also a need, Evans said, noting just five per cent are in trades occupations and most are in such areas as tourism and esthetics as opposed to the more traditional fields.
Evans went on to issue a "call to action" for businesses to take on apprentices and bring the numbers back to pre-recession levels and then some.
"Apprenticeship is an
employment-based training
pathway," Evans said. "In other words, you can't have an
apprentice unless you've got an employer who's prepared to take on that apprentice and we took a real hit during the recession."
There are currently 30,000 apprentices in the system, down from 35,000 pre-recession and 9,168 employers are taking on apprentices, down from 10,884, and Evans said it usually takes up to a decade to bring such numbers back up to pre-recession levels.
"The literature suggests that in past recessions, it's taken 10 years to recover to those pre-recession levels," Evans said. "We don't have 10 years to get there, we've got to accelerate that process."
