Labour Market Study
Redesign Rupert’s 2019 Labour Market Study outlines the current composition of Prince Rupert’s labour market, identifies critical shortages, and summarizes how projected major projects in Northern BC will continue to affect the local labour force. The study will also help Redesign Rupert and its partners plan for the launch of a community recruitment brand, with recommendations around community marketing, local education and training initiatives, tracking measures, and benchmarks for recruitment success.
Through a competitive process in the spring of 2019, Redesign Rupert, in partnership with the City of Prince Rupert, Community Futures of the Pacific Northwest, the Prince Rupert Port Authority, and Hecate Strait Employment Development Society, retained Roslyn Kunin & Associates, Inc. in partnership with Human Capital Strategies to answer the following key questions:
What is the composition of Prince Rupert’s labour market? What percentage of local employment does each industry/sector make up?
Where are the largest employment gaps, now and projected? Which industries/sectors are most in need of human capital, and which will be most affected in the future?
What specific occupations are most in demand/will be with proposed projects announced? How can employers in Prince Rupert prepare to fill these positions, either through external recruitment or local training & educational opportunities?
What factors specific to Prince Rupert are impeding local workforce recruitment efforts? (ie, rental housing, isolation)
What links can be drawn to a larger, either provincial or national, labour market imbalance? (ie, is this an issue specific to Prince Rupert, or is it a symptom of a broader labour market issue?)
In which target cities/regions/countries would recruitment efforts potentially be most successful for specific occupations that have been identified as most in demand/most difficult to fill? (Identifying specific target recruitment geographies will inform marketing/recruitment plans)
How can we measure the success of a recruitment campaign? (Establishing benchmarks for success and analytics to measure them annually).
The result is a data-driven report that provides Redesign Rupert & its partners with a current understanding of Prince Rupert’s labour market in order to best determine where recruitment efforts should be targeted, how to partner with local employers in the most effective way, and how to organize locally to support community-wide recruitment & retention challenges. More specifically, it provides a list of the top 20 priority occupations where job growth will occur most rapidly and where increased recruitment support will be needed. It also provides a summary of efforts by other rural, resource-driven communities to recruit new residents, outlining their strategies and lessons learned. Finally, it provides a list of recommended target recruitment grounds and a summary of recommendations from local employers to direct Redesign Rupert’s work.
Key Findings:
Between 2018 and 2028, new job openings in Prince Rupert are projected to increase by an average of 3.3% per year, three times the projected provincial average of 1.1% per year.
Population data for the Prince Rupert area helps highlight why the labour shortage is so severe; population growth in the area has remained stagnant despite rapid economic growth. For the municipality of Prince Rupert, the population changed very little between 2011 and 2018. By comparison, the province as a whole experienced annual population growth of 1.5% per year over the same period.
Overall it is estimated that 1,910 new fulltime jobs will be created in Prince Rupert up to 2030, with projections of 1,016 port jobs, 508 ancillary support jobs, and 386 tertiary jobs.
Should all capital projects go ahead as proposed, in peak years, additional labour requirements could be as high as 600 annual positions in the construction industry, and as high as 280 annual positions in transportation, warehousing, and other related industries.
