Merritt stands to gain some insight into the community’s workforce in 2015.
The provincial government’s Ministry of Social Development and Social Innovation has sent $108,000 in funding to Venture Kamloops for a project that looks at labour market information and aims to increase employability.
Venture Kamloops — the economic development arm of the City of Kamloops — is now in the process of hiring consultants who will review a 10-year forecast of emerging labour market issues and trends including training requirements, skill gaps, needs of local employers, and barriers to hiring and retention.
A human resource strategy report will be the end result of this project, and it’s expected to be complete by August 2015.
Venture Kamloops executive director Jim Anderson said the organization has also leveraged funding from corporate partners such as Kinder Morgan, bringing the total price tag attached to the study to about $200,000.
“It’s a major study,” he said.
Merritt will be one of 16 communities studied over the course of the next year.
Anderson said the plan is to meet with multiple sources, such as local employers, starting with each community’s municipality.
He said this study will examine the supply and demand of the region’s labour market, and it is hoped it will address the notion of there being a shortage when it comes to skilled and unskilled labour jobs.
“We hear this anecdotally, and it certainly is a thought that’s out there, but we don’t have data to support that,” Anderson said.
The region the report covers essentially spans the Thompson-Nicola Regional District.
The other communities included in the study are Logan Lake, 100 Mile House, Ashcroft, Barriere, Blue River, Cache Creek, Chase, Clearwater, Clinton, Lone Butte, Kamloops, Lytton, McBride, Sun Peaks and Valemount.
“We want to collect primary data from the communities so that we can have a much clearer, quantifiable picture of what the labour market is in each of the areas,” Anderson said.
Anderson said this study will show what the labour pool in the region and each community looks like, and what the demands and projected demands for labour jobs are in the region and each community.
Once the study is complete, the public document will be housed on Venture Kamloops’ website, likely in the fall of 2015.
One reason Venture Kamloops is conducting this study is to figure out if the region’s population can fill the needs of the proposed Ajax Mine near Kamloops and Kinder Morgan’s TransMountain pipeline expansion project, which runs through Merritt.
“While we realize that much of the labour for those projects would come from outside of our region, we would like to know what the overall demand would be including those projects and if we stand a chance of filling any portion of those jobs locally,” Anderson said.
