INNOVATION January-February 2012

f ea t u r e s

coming to Vancouver from China, South Korea and other Asian countries. “Just huge amounts of foreign money,” he says. Pastrick notes that non-residential construction will be a growing part of the industry in 2012 and beyond “with large increases in engineering and industrial construction related to major project investments,” including two new office towers in downtown Vancouver. Oil and Gas BC is the second largest producer of natural gas in Canada. Most of that activity is in the northeast region of the province, where capital investment doubled between 2006 and 2009. The PetroleumHuman Resources Council of Canada reports that despite global economic uncertainty and low gas prices continuing into 2012, a number of petroleum industry players expect to experience growth this year. The Council’s Current and Short-TermWorkforce Trends within the Canadian Petroleum Industry report (Q3/Q4 2011), based on a survey of 40 companies, noted that jobs in demand include geoscience professionals and experienced engineers for various disciplines including drilling, reservoir/development, production/operations, completions, pipeline integrity and process and field engineers. Another reason BC engineers are in demand is the “gravitational pull effect from Alberta” according to John O’Grady, partner with Prism Economics and Analysis, which has been tracking the labour market for engineers in Canada since 2008. “Many consulting firms

that are based in BC have offices in Calgary or Edmonton, but perform much of the engineering work using their BC resources.” High Tech BC’s technology sector is small compared with Ontario and Quebec, but it has grown significantly in the last decade and now employs more people than forestry, mining and the oil and gas industries combined. However, in 2012 “very low to moderate growth” is anticipated, says Lee Jacobs, Marketing and Communications Advisor for the Information and Communications Technology Council. “There’s so much uncertainty in the economic environment …companies are not making big investments in upgrading hardware.” As well, spending on research and development will grow more slowly between 2011 and 2016 than it did in the five years before the economic downturn of 2008, according to the Council’s Outlook for Human Resources in the ICT Labour Market, 2011-2016 . Conclusion The engineering and geoscience professions in BC will fare no worse—and in some cases better—than other occupations in 2012. Overall, it’s a wait-and-see game. As Carrick says, “Europe is still a huge dark cloud hanging over everybody and what’s going to happen there, and if there’s going to be a repeat of the financial problems of 2009, nobody knows. If Europe was cleaned up, we’d actually be in not bad shape in terms of the world economy.” v

32

J AN UA R Y/ F E B R UA R Y 2 012

i n n o va t i o n