Vancouver Job Market

According to BC government statistics
(http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/dd/handout/bccanlfs.pdf if you want to have a gander for yourself) the unemployment rate in British Columbia rose from 4.6% in 2008 to 7.6% in 2009. Specifically in Vancouver, unemployment rose from 4.3% in 2008 to 7% in 2009. These figures were released in January 2010.

I include these stats not to scare anyone but to illustrate that contrary to popular belief that Vancouver was magically immune to the global recession there were indeed many layoffs. I know this to be true from the industry I work (Communications and advertising) in in which there were many redundancies and a lovely pay freeze for most of 2009.

However, its also important to know that many redundancies occurred in very specific industries and the following link is a pretty good way of figuring out two things.
(http://www.bcstats.gov.bc.ca/data/dd/handout/EMPREGN.pdf)
1.The industries that employ the most people in Vancouver
2. The employment rate per industry for the past couple of years

So for example you can see that the numbers employed in manufacturing and construction fell in 2009 (not a massive decrease though) but there was an increase in healthcare and education. It’s a good place to start to get an idea of how the labour market is divided up.

Anecdotally speaking Vancouver’s biggest industry is tourism. There are high hopes that Vancouver and BC will attract increasing tourism post the 2010 Winter Olympics and that the province will be seen as a credible, modern tourist destination for both summer and winter vacations. To that end, many hotels were built prior to the Games as well as the Vancouver Convention Centre with the hope of attracting international conventions.

Vancouver is also a hotspot for the fim and production industry. You basically can’t walk around the city without passing through a set for a film or TV show. So careers related to that industry must be in relatively consistent demand.

A lot of jobs are in the public sector in various government bodies such as Vancity (Credit Union) BC Hydro (Hydro and Power Authority), VANOC (although that was just for the Olympics I think) CTC (Canadian Tourism Commission).

The Vancouver Sun (one of the main dailies over here) recently published this report (http://www2.canada.com/vancouversun/features/public-sector-salary-database/index.html) about public sector salaries, such as government salaries, university and college salaries, health service authority etc. Its handy to just get some insight on the various salary levels.

I will build on this post as I do more research into the various industries and have a read through stats (I like stats I’m a nerd) but I hope this is a helpful start.

I will also post some links to job sites but good old craigslist is a very reliable start. (www.craigslist.com) just to have a look around.