Mining-sector demand for experienced engineers is booming locally, leading an otherwise sluggish engineering job market where employers are only slowly starting to re-hire following recession layoffs.
The new resource jobs are being driven by rising prices for commodities such as oil, copper and gold, according to Bryan Watts, president and CEO for heavy civil engineering firm Klohn Crippen Berger.
“The price of copper has gone from $1.30 to $4.40 or so a pound right now,” Watts said. “You just can’t produce experienced people as fast as the price of copper goes up and generates projects.”
Watts said intermediate and senior mining-sector engineers – “the guys who drive the projects” – are so difficult to find locally right now that his company is recruiting them from as far away as Great Britain and South Africa.
He added that at Klohn Crippen Berger, high demand for more senior mining-sector civil, mechanical and electrical engineers is also accelerating opportunities among the junior ranks.
“Young people are moving up the food chain faster than they were before,” he said.
Judi Wannamaker, who recruits mining-sector engineers for David Aplin Recruiting, concurred that the mining sector is this year’s growth-market for engineering jobs. She noted that a key challenge to recruiting in this sector is the need to attract people willing to work in remote locations such as Tumbler Ridge.
“If you like to ice fish and skidoo, then it’s great,” she said. “If you have kids in Montessori school, then it might not be so great.”
Wannamaker said that apart from the strong demand for mining-sector engineers, the demand for the rest of B.C.’s engineers is picking up fairly gradually after what she characterized as an “over-layoff” triggered by the recent recession. Wannamaker said she expects the trend to continue.
“It’s not going to be like 1999 or 2000 when everyone was hiring like crazy with the dot-com bubble, but just a nice, steady, gradual increase in terms of hiring,” she said.
On the Lower Mainland infrastructure front, both Wannamaker and Brian Burnell, vice-president of engineering recruiting company MountainCrest Personnel Inc., noted that the Port Mann Bridge improvement project has created a significant number of bridge engineering jobs.
Wannamaker added that when the Evergreen Line project – the new rapid transit expansion – moves forward, that will also create a substantial number of new civil and geotechnical engineering jobs.
Both Wannamaker and Burnell noted that a continuing challenge in the local engineering job market is finding work for new Canadians.
“We get a lot of resumés from people who have just come into Canada and unfortunately you can’t help them as much as you’d like to because a lot of companies are looking for sort of minimal Canadian [work] experience,” Burnell said.
Wannamaker added that companies usually want engineers who have been accredited as profession engineers by the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of BC, a process which she said can be quite straightforward for Canadians, but far more complex for engineers with non-Canadian credentials.
Another perennial challenge in the local engineering job market is drawing women into a still male-dominated field.
Elizabeth Croft, the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council’s (NSERC) B.C. and Yukon chair for women in science and engineering, estimated that women represent only about 10% of B.C.’s engineering workforce and less than 20% of local and national post-secondary engineering programs.
Croft, who’s also a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of British Columbia, said local companies are keen to hire more women engineers.
“We have companies coming to UBC asking us, ‘What can we do to help you attract more women engineers?’” she said. “ So that’s a pretty strong message.”
Croft said her NSERC chair position, geared at attracting more B.C. and Yukon women into engineering, includes initiatives such as industry workshops aimed at helping female engineers rise from intermediate to senior ranks.
The first two workshops will run in late March and will cover topics such as goal-setting, as well as networking to help women rise in company hierarchies.
“You have to have women in senior roles to attract women into engineering, so I think the net effect [of these workshops] will be to ultimately attract more women into engineering,” she said.
Wannamaker said she doesn’t think gender plays much of a role in companies’ hiring decisions.
“I think a lot of companies can see women in the industry as a breath of fresh air,” she said. “But at the end of the day, with engineers, they’re a pragmatic bunch; they want the best bottom in the seat.”