A new online labour market forecasting tool will help British Columbians, employers and government predict the supply and demand for different industries in the province during the next decade.
The B.C. labour market scenario model was created by the Ministry of Advanced Education and Labour Market Development (ALMD) in partnership with BC Stats and the Ministry of Finance.
The forecasting tool, which is to be updated annually, currently predicts that demand for employees in B.C. will outweigh supply in the coming decade. It predicts that there will be 1,126,420 new job openings by 2019.
Of those openings, about 450,000 are expected to be created through economic growth. The rest would be created through the replacement of citizens leaving the work force.
The tool can be used to breakdown supply and demand figures for various industries as well as different regions of B.C.
B.C.’s aging population will result it in it becoming increasingly difficult to meet the labour and skills demands required to support economic growth in the future, according to an overview accompanying the tool. The recession, it noted, brought with it a 3% increase in the unemployment rate in 2009.
While labour markets are beginning to recover, “the pace of labour market recovery is expected to be impacted by economic conditions at home and abroad for quite some time.
“Never before has the need been so great to learn to anticipate the future of our labour market.”