A vision for the Aviation and Aerospace Workforce
For your own copy of the 2018 LMI Report in English, click here, or in French, click here.
The CCAA 2018 Labour Market Information Report for Aviation & Aerospace
The Canadian Council for Aviation & Aerospace, CCAA, is pleased to provide the 2018 Labour Market Information (LMI) Report to industry.
The report quantifies the workforce of the industry, as well as projected labour and skills shortages. The study projects a need to hire 55,000 new workers by 2025 to keep pace with projected industry growth and to replace workers who are retiring or leaving the workforce for other reasons. This represents one third of the existing workforce of 154,000 today.
The study also looks at the current and projected number of graduates. Only a quarter of the needed workers—about 14,000—will be domestic graduates.
The LMI report highlights issues which need immediate attention, if the industry is to have enough workers with the right skills, to keep pace with growth and retirements. It confirms the need for a National Labour Market Strategy to address these issues.
CCAA has been conducting LMI studies for many years. Data collection is seen as a diagnostic tool which will help provide key stakeholders with the data necessary to make informed decisions.” said Theresa Davis-Woodhouse, Director of Project Management and Accreditation for the CCAA.
CCAA, and industry use LMI reports to identify labour force challenges, and create programs to address them. For instance, CCAA now administers an ESDC-funded wage subsidy program for employers in the industry to hire students (e.g. co-op, interns, field placement or summer students). The Student Work Integrated Learning Program, SWILP, runs for another 3 years, so employers can make longer term plans for future hiring.
“On behalf of the industry,” Robert Donald, the Executive Director of CCAA said “We wish to acknowledge and thank the Federal Government for funding this study. Without their support the study would not have been possible.”
To get your copy of the full report, please contact Theresa Davis-Woodhouse, at 613-727-8272, Ext. 247, tdaviswoodhouse@avaerocouncil.ca or click here for your copy in English, or here for your copy in French.
Background of the CCAA Labour Market Information Project for the Aviation and Aerospace Industry
CCAA has begun to build the first Labour Market Information (LMI) system that will consolidate and standardize current, accurate LMI for all sub-sectors of the aviation and aerospace industry: aircraft maintenance, aerospace manufacturing, fixed-wing and helicopter companies, airlines, airports and professional pilots.
Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) is funding this initiative for three years. The project began in early 2014 and CCAA is well on its way to understanding the needs of the industry and the required data collection outcomes.
The project intent in the first fourteen months is to run a beta data collection survey with limited partners, regions and occupations. CCAA has already secured 20 project partners across Canada. CCAA has engaged many of these partners and various industry associations to help determine which occupations and data fields to concentrate on during the initial survey for the most relevant results.
What differentiates the LMI data this system will collect from other economic and LMI reports which exist for some sub-sectors, will be the level and detail of occupational data. CCAA will collect needed data on individual occupations and not only on broader job groupings.
CCAA will also collect supply side data from various sources including training organizations across Canada. This will help industry know if there is sufficient industry specific training in place to keep up with projected future demands.
Labour Market Information (LMI) helps align skills development to industry needs. Skilled labour is paramount to successful performance in the aviation and aerospace sector. Canadian aviation and aerospace companies are already in very serious global competition for more and better-trained workers, and yet there is no nationally coherent LMI available to ensure that industry has enough workers with the right skills to allow for the projected growth.
The current lack of coherence in LMI data can be corrected by creating this national LMI system using a standardized data set that is as useful for the East coast as it is for the West and the North, while allowing the information to be analyzed from a number of perspectives; by region, by occupation, by level of educational requirement, by gender, by professional category, etc. This data will also be incorporated into the Working in Canada website to assist youth making career decisions, workers transitioning from one industry to another, and new Canadians.
CCAA is working with partners to align, as much as possible, data and timing to reduce multiple surveys with different data fields at different times of the year.
One of the greatest obstacles to developing and implementing solutions that combat skills shortages, such as recruitment, up-skilling, and training, is a lack of credible intelligence within the industry. Stakeholders with vested interests in increased performance of the industry’s workforce need reliable labour market intelligence that specifically concerns the workforce needed for aviation operations and aerospace manufacturing. This project will produce high quality, segmentable data that will be widely available. This will have a huge impact on industry awareness, human resources planning and workforce management, skills development, implementation of training programs and required up-skilling, and global competitiveness.
For additional information please contact Theresa Davis-Woodhouse, Director of Project Management, at tdaviswoodhouse@avaerocouncil.ca or 1-800-448-9715, ext. 247,
Or Leslie Hogan, Project Manager, lhogan@avaerocouncil.ca, 1-800-448-9715, ext. 225.
For a copy of the Report on the Aviation and Aerospace Industry Labour Market Information Survey and Interviews, please contact Theresa Davis-Woodhouse