Construction employers from sa国际传媒 who headed to Ireland for the second year in a row to hire skilled tradespeople found what they were looking for. They plan to offer jobs to almost 500 Irish workers.
The fact that those jobs are going to foreigners instead of some of the tens of thousands of unemployed British Columbians shows how we are failing to train workers our economy needs.
The sa国际传媒 Construction Association took its show on the road at the end of October, putting on job fairs in Belfast and Dublin; it hoped to hire 600 workers. About half of the 28 employers represented were from sa国际传媒 It did the same thing in March 2012.
In Belfast, about 800 prospective workers showed up, and about 2,000 in Dublin. The association expects 484 will be offered jobs when all the paperwork is finished. As the Celtic Tiger withers into a forlorn tabby cat, Canadian employers are taking advantage of the Irish slump.
The provincial government expects one million job openings over the next 10 years. Of those, 153,000 are expected to be in trades and related occupations.
About a third of the vacancies will come from job growth, while the other two-thirds are pegged to the usual suspect these days: retirements.
At the same time, sa国际传媒鈥檚 unemployment rate is 6.7 per cent, which translates to about 166,200 people who need jobs.
Bringing trained workers over from Ireland is not going to help those unemployed people, unless they can get jobs serving coffee to the journeymen.
What would help the unemployed British Columbians is training so they could go after some of the 153,000 jobs.
In the days of the Celtic Tiger boom, Ireland invested in training tradespeople to meet the demand. Its reputation for turning out skilled workers is one factor that attracted the sa国际传媒 firms.
British Columbia, meanwhile, has not been turning out trained workers to meet its demand. For too long, schools and parents have pushed young people toward university education and away from the trades. Changing that mindset is a slow process.
However, we know it does have to change. Young people are getting the message. For the message to be of value, we have to back it up with action. Government has to offer education and counselling support to get apprentices through a tough process.
Employers have to offer apprenticeships. The sa国际传媒 Federation of Labour says that between 2009 and 2012, the number of employers registered to accept apprentices dropped from 10,789 to 9,093. In some fields, the number of apprenticeships has declined by 20 per cent in five years. Workers complain that employer reluctance to hire apprentices is their main stumbling block.
Getting an apprenticeship is only one hurdle. In the first six months of the 2012-13 fiscal year, only 35 per cent of apprentices successfully completed their training and got their professional qualifications, down from 43 per cent in 2009-10, according to the sa国际传媒 Federation of Labour. Those are chilling numbers when one looks at the 1,059 new apprentices who were registered in the first six months of 2012-13. If 60 per cent of that already-small number fail to get their certification, sa国际传媒鈥檚 worker deficit will grow.
The government says that with 650,000 children in the education system today, there will not be enough graduates to fill all the job vacancies. That shouldn鈥檛 be carte blanche to bring in planeloads of foreign workers.
It should be a call to action, to make sure every one of those 650,000 students has the education and training to fill one of those promised jobs.
