BC Leads Country in Job Vacancies
B.C. has the highest job vacancy rate in the private sector in the country at 3%, meaning there are just over 50 thousand job openings. The national vacancy rate is 2.5%.
Canadian Federation of Independent Business Economist Aaron Aerts says the BC rate is a mixed blessing. “On the surface, it indicates the provincial job market is tight and the economy is doing relatively well. The downside is it’s also a clear indication many entrepreneurs are encountering a great deal of difficulty finding enough qualified people to work in their businesses.”
Aerts says having a vacant position for months on end can be a real detriment for businesses trying to grow. On the positive side, businesses often offer higher wages in order to attract people to fill those vacancies. According to the CFIB, businesses with job vacancies planned organization wide wage increases of 1.9%, compared to a 1.3% increase planned by businesses which are fully staffed.
Aerts says the vacancy rate in B.C. is expected to increase as the greying population retires “That’s why there is definitely a need to be cognisant that there should be action to train those who are unemployed. In B.C the unemployment rate is 6.6% which is relatively low compared to the rest of the country, but clearly there is a miss-match in skills and location of those veteran employees. Ideally you would like to see the unemployment rate come down and the vacancy rate come down, so that is just about a skill miss-match and location miss-match. ”
He says governments can encourage job training and offer re-location assistance for the unemployed He says government should also try to “work with businesses to try and figure out just exactly what they’re looking for. There’s also the ability of the provincial government to work with the federal government to try to fix the temporary foreign workers program and find ways to get workers from abroad to fill vacant positions.”
The CFIB survey also shows vacancy rates have gone up modestly in services sectors, and declined among goods producers.
Comments
not in my industry.,
Same here. I don’t know where all these job vacancies are.
“The CFIB survey also shows vacancy rates have gone up modestly in services sectors, and declined among goods producers.”
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In other words, those who produce and provide ‘goods’ are still working themselves out of work. They’re producing as much, or more, with ever fewer employees. Becoming more efficient, I think it’s called. But will this be viewed as a ‘good’ thing, or a ‘bad’ one?
Meaningless stat unless they break those jobs down by full-time / part-time. I would hazard a guess the majority are part-time service positions.
A job vacancy just means there’s someone out there willing to hire someone at X dollars per hour. Likely it’s the minimum wage service agency that can’t find people willing to work for minimum wage – and I’m not surprised. With CPP, EI, and tax deductions, not a lot left to finance a car to get to work. The vacancies will drop if/when the employers offer enough to make it worth working. More likely it’s a ploy to bring in TFW’s.
The new child tax benefit will exacerbate this problem as a single parent with 2 children pretty much needs $36,000.00 to be in a better position working vs staying at home with the kids and collecting welfare.
Yes, it’s worth noting that we also lead the country in lowest minimum wage and worst child (i.e. parent) poverty rates.
Some of these statements are total BS.—Can not find enough qualified people to fill positions, need to fix foreign workers program. Why don’t they just come out and say we are looking for guaranteed cheap labor.
You should look at the ‘big picture’, oldman1. Suppose wages in all those service sector jobs were raised to whatever is now considered to be a living wage. The first thing that would happen would be that desired living wage, whatever it’s currently thought to need to be, suddenly would no longer be enough. But everyone might feel good, briefly, because they’re now working with bigger figures on their paycheques.
The Education Industrial Complex charging what their market can bear . Not only a failer on its own merits but against The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights . Disgusting leaving the young being undereducated , unemployed , while jobs go unfilled because the complex needs to fills it coffers .
i wanna know where all these jobs are too I have been looking for months they sure as crap are not being advertized
I suspect a lot of them are for the farms in the lower mainland and the Southern Interior. These people will need a lot of workers, however because they don’t pay that much they will show a lot of vacancies. The balance I suspect would be in the retail industry that pays minimum wage (usually) and restricts hours for some to 20 hours per week.
Highly unlikely that these are good, high paying jobs. The unemployment numbers come from people who have been laid off in Tumbler Ridge, Endako Mines, Huckleberry Mine in Houston, Chetwyn, plus a lot of people in the oil and gas industry in the Peace River Country, and of course a lot of people who used to work in the oil patch in Alberta.
Lots of Alberta plates around town.
I guess if they really need those workers they will increase the wage they are offering.
If they can get the cost of the wage increase back in price that is what’s likely to happen. But if they can’t? Well, there’s not a whole lot of sense in any business ‘working’ its way into bankruptcy, is there?
Maybe someone could send them the 1500 plus resumes from the last job fair they had in PG. Oh I forgot we need to fix the TFWs program.
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