The Canadian Skills Shortage: Keeping Tradespeople Employed for the Foreseeable Future – MarketWatch

The current challenge of all major industrial manufacturers in Canada is the shortage of skilled workers with the right experience.

Research conducted by the Canadian Steel Trade and Employment Congress, (CSTEC) underscores this challenge in the broader Steel Sector.

With a very high value-add per employee, when compared to the rest of manufacturing, the broader Steel Sector is a good example of the “perfect storm” facing industrial manufacturing on Canadian soil. Over the next five years the steel industry will need to hire between 19,000 and 29,000 workers from all categories just to replace retiring employees. A minimum of 5,000 skilled tradespersons will also need to be replaced. This must occur during a period of significant retraction within the global steel industry.

As the bulk of the baby boomers exit the labour market they walk away with a lot of accumulated knowledge, in some cases as much as forty years.

Failure to capture and transfer this knowledge to the new workforce presents significant risk to all aspects of the numerous manufacturing operations within the broader Steel Sector. 

This failure to act would result in direct impacts on safety, the environment, productivity, maintenance and certainly cost.

9 RECOMMENDATIONS

The nine recommendations to emerge as a result of CSTEC’s research include addressing this Knowledge Transfer on behalf of the Canadian Steel Sector.

They also include increasing collaboration with the steel-producing regions located in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Alberta and British Columbia to continue developing a National Skilled Trades Strategy using a consortia approach. Early success with the Hamilton Skilled Trades and Apprenticeship Consortium can serve as a model for this type of broad collaborative effort, with special attention given to each unique steel-producing region in Canada….

via The Canadian Skills Shortage: Keeping Tradespeople Employed for the Foreseeable Future – MarketWatch.