Post on 23-Feb-2016
description
How mucH money do they earn?
Susan Bach • Jennifer French • Ricardo Scebba
okanaganlife.com Jan|Feb 2014
20 Jan/Feb 2014 Okanagan Life Magazine
Aside from the major
league hockey players
and mysterious
Hollywood stars who
may or may not own
lakeshore palaces
hereabouts, what
does everybody in
the Okanagan do?
You know, to make
money? A living?
Take a Sunday drive through one of the developments carved into the hillsides of
pretty much any Valley community and you will wonder. Even if you live in one of those suburbs where Tuscan style mini-mansions are popping up like Okanagan daisies on a warm spring day—still you may wonder. What does everybody do?
You wave to the new neigh-bours as you walk Bowser to the mailbox or maybe glance out the window and see another moving truck. “What does everybody do?”
Kelowna, for example, is a city that on first glance seems to have
By Julie Cosgrave
no—well, very little—visible means of support. There are no IBMs or Xeroxes. No bank towers; no giant head offices filled with executive suites. There isn’t an enormous resource facility—nary a mine or giant pulp mill. No smoke-belching factory.
And our old and venerable sources of modest work and income seem to have drifted away in recent decades. Packinghouses appear more decorative than real. Mom and pop motels have mostly disappeared. And while the peaches and beaches that supported them are still here, the economy of fruit and tourism has changed. Now we have condos instead of auto courts,
hey
400,000
300,000
200,000
100,000
0
Government Jobs
Data is gleaned from job postings and
public documents. Figures presented
are median salaries not including
allowances, bonuses, incentives,
employer-paid benefits or pension
contributions; in some cases these
are substantial. Hourly rates are
annualized (37.5 hrs/wk). Limited data
is available for a few occupations such
as dentist; these figures represent
net income (after write-offs) from
census data. Figures are specific to
the Thompson-Okanagan unless
otherwise noted. —Dawn Renaud
Find more at workingincanada.gc.ca.
Salary Survey
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(BC
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okanaganlife.com Jan/Feb 2014 21
more vineyards than orchards.But surely everybody isn’t
a winemaker or a retired Alberta oil executive.
We look around and see appar-ent wealth—upscale homes, new construction and comfortable suburbs, luxury car, boat and RV dealers. So, what does everybody do?
Curiously, while it can feel as though the Okanagan is anoma-lous, somehow different from other places—an outlier from other regional economies—it isn’t really. At least, not completely.
heydo?
Institutions and ArtsMedical
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$0 – $25,000 $75,001 – $100,000
$25,001 – $50,000 $100,001 – $200,000
$50,001 – $75,000 $200,001 +
22 Jan/Feb 2014 Okanagan Life Magazine
Tech talk
The Conference Board of Canada says that across the country employment growth in the professional, scien-tific and technical services category outpaced all other sectors except
health care and construction. Sounds like a snapshot of Central Okanagan business, industry and employment.
Tech, which barely existed here not so very long ago, is big—and growing—up more than 95 per cent in the five-year period 2008 to 2012. An anecdotal first glance
shows that we’re having what you might call a computer-generated moment. A moment that began in a snow-covered place, with penguins.
When local software designers Lance Priebe, Lane Merrifield and Dave Krysko sold Club Penguin to Disney for some $350 million, Disney chose to keep production here. So now we have hundreds of anima-tors and digital game developers working in just that one company.
That nexus of tech creativity has produced a remarkable knock-on effect about which Andrew Greer, the enthusiastic business development manager of Accelerate Okanagan, knows a great deal. When we sit down to chat late on a Friday after-noon, Andrew is almost ready to call it a day and head out to a monthly free beer event, a social and net-working gathering hosted on rota-tion by local tech companies.
But he takes time to explain that Accelerate is a non-profit organization created to advance the digital indus-try locally. Its St. Paul Street office is action central. That day Accelerate’s job board lists some 60 positions available in the industry. Some will be telecommuting positions, but about 90 per cent will be based in Kelowna.
“We can’t find enough people,” says Andrew. “Animation people. Coders.”
Accelerate Okanagan’s
monthly social and
networking get together.
Photo courtesy Accelerate Okanagan.
400,000
300,000
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okanaganlife.com Jan/Feb 2014 23
The plan—Accelerate Okanagan’s blue sky projection—is to have 20,000 tech jobs here in the Valley within 10 years.
Central Okanagan economic devel-opment director Robert Fine, whose job it is to see the economic future and help steer us toward it, is talking tech too. “It will become more important,” he says. “It’s exponential too. These businesses tend to aggregate and con-gregate. Some have repatriated recently or moved businesses here. And some are on the verge of explosive growth.”
“ It’s exponential too. These businesses tend to aggregate and congregate. Some have repatriated recently or moved businesses here. And some are on the verge of explosive growth.”
— Robert FineCentral Okanagan economic
development director Robert Fine.
Photo by Bruce Kemp.
Scientific and Technical Agricultural and Forestry
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24 Jan/Feb 2014 Okanagan Life Magazine
On a jet plane
Jenelle Hynes, marketing and com-munications manager for Kelowna International Airport, says people in the tech and gaming sector regu-larly travel to and from Los Angeles on the now daily non-stop flights.
“You would be surprised by the number of commuters,” she says.
“People commute to high tech jobs in Southern California and vice versa. And we have a huge commuting com-munity to the oil fields up north.”
“ People commute to high tech jobs in Southern California and vice versa. And we have a huge commuting community to the oil fields up north.”
— Jenelle HynesMarketing and
communicationsmanager for Kelowna International AirportJenelle Hynes.
But those commuters might not surprise you as much as the com-muters to the UK or South Africa.
“It’s huge,” says Jenelle about this briefcase-toting, globe-trotting segment of the local population. “They live here for the lifestyle and might do six weeks away and then several weeks home. The family is here, the kids are in school …”
Robert says the city and region are actively courting the commuter component of the population—par-ticularly those in the oil patch. “We have lifestyle refugees,” he says. “From Calgary, Vancouver, Edmonton.”
It’s academic
A surprising number of your neigh-bours work in education. UBC’s Okanagan campus alone employs 400 faculty plus a full- and part-time support and administration staff of nearly 500. Robert thinks the impor-tance of the university is probably not recognized by most Kelowna residents as they go about their daily lives.
“Really, I think people will be surprised at the importance of the university and how it impacts the region, now and into the future” he says.
“Even though they maybe cannot see the university day-to-day, it is having an impact; the engineering programs, medicine—all of it. Huge impact.”
Surprisingly, statistics show that 60 per cent of UBCO grads are remain-ing in the Central Okanagan.
Okanagan College is another major employer in the education sector.
400,000
300,000
200,000
100,000
0
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Photos contributed.
26 Jan/Feb 2014 Okanagan Life Magazine
Think small
And what do they do? Perhaps these grads are poised to join the entrepre-neurial class; start their own small businesses. Because that, it turns out, is what tons of people are doing. The Central Okanagan Economic Development Commission’s strategic plan notes that 95 per cent of busi-nesses in the region have fewer than 20 employees—54 per cent have none.
“Kelowna and area is a hotbed for small business,” says Robert. We
have about 16,000 of them. Many are home-based, one-person busi-nesses (the 54 per cent with no employees), which curiously circles back to the tech sector in some ways. Maybe even to the free beer.
“Entrepreneurs can be lonely,” says Andrew.
But not everyone is sitting home alone, hunched over a com-puter. Statistics from 2012 indicate that we’re also a region of shop-keepers. The largest percentage of employment by industry (15.9 per
cent) was in retail trade. So, lots of people minding the store.
But wait. Those suburbs on the hillsides aren’t building them-selves. According to BC Stats, there are more than 3,000 firms involved in construction in the Central Okanagan. Those firms vary widely in size and scope (about 20 per cent have no employees), but employ 11.3 per cent of the local workforce.
And all those houses and condos and commercial spaces don’t sell or rent themselves either: real estate
Small business is king
in the Okanagan with
retail topping the charts.
RetailSports Pension and
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Espresso photo contributed; retail photo by Laurie Carter.
okanaganlife.com Jan/Feb 2014 27
agents and all the other people in the business of property sales, rental and leasing form a substantial part of the business community as well—11.7 per cent of all Central Okanagan firms. But that percentage is weirdly skewed by the fact that most of those
“firms” have no employees. Which is to say that they are mostly made up of self-employed individuals.
Healthy numbers
On the other hand, they might be among the 4,000 or so who work for Interior Health in Kelowna and area. Erin Toews, a communications officer with Interior Health reports that about 2,000 of these people are employed at Kelowna General Hospital alone. About 1,400 of them are nurses. “Then there are an additional 300 or so unit clerks and care aides as well,” says Toews. “It’s a busy place.”
In 2012 (the most recent stats available) the health care and social assistance category showed the second largest percentage of employment by industry.
A nice little convergence of our healthcare and digital industry profiles is QHR. This homegrown high tech company creates and sells cutting edge hospital management software that is used in both Canadian and American medical facilities. Headquartered in Kelowna, QHR employs about 100 people locally.
ExitSMART.ca
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To ExitSMART™, contact Gary Parmar, CPA, CA, Succession Services Leader at 250.979.2577 or gary.parmar@mnp.ca
250.861.5399 • paul@okanaganlife.comPhoto contributed.
28 Jan/Feb 2014 Okanagan Life Magazine
And agriculture: the peaches, apples, cherries and grapes? Strangely, agriculture is in the same bin as fish-ing, forestry and hunting. (Hunting?) And it’s not a large bin — a total of 574 firms. While wine making has given us a more attractive and sophisticated profile of late, and it has created a whole new group of professionals and workers, we are definitely not stay-ing down on the farm any more.
Be that as it may, when those lifestyle refugees arrive at the Kelowna airport (around 2,000 people work there, by the way, when you include Flightcraft, a venerable local success story with a nearly 1,000-member workforce) they too will swoon and fall in love with the beaches, the peaches and those elegant vineyards that seem to stretch out their lovely arms and wave to you from every hillside.
And whatever their line of work, they’ll probably find something to do.
Julie Cosgrave is
a Kelowna writer
whose work
has appeared in
magazines and
newspapers and on
radio. She recently
published a novel,
Objects of Affection.
Peaches and beaches
One thing that not everybody does (contrary to what our sense of the place tells us) is work in tourism-related businesses. The sector-by-sector analysis shows that while employ-ment in the accommodation and food services industry grew by almost 11 per cent in the period 2008 through 2012,
Agriculture employs relatively few in the Okanagan.
the number of firms involved is only around 4 per cent of total businesses. Even if we add in cultural industries (less than one per cent, but growing) and entertainment and recreation industries (less than one per cent) tour-ism/hospitality related businesses seem surprisingly few in number — about 575 of them according to economic development commission numbers.
Photo by Laurie Carter.
1.9%Agriculture
1.9%Forestry/Fishing
3.55%Public Admin
4.3%Other Services
8.83%Accommodation/
Food Services
15.93%Retail
8.82%Technical
5.92%Education
6.46%Manufacturing
95.2%ProfessionalScientificTechnical
47.1%Culture/Recreation
10.9%Real EstateFinance
10.8%Accommodation/Food Services
4.74%Transportation
5.49%Real Estate/Finance
3.77%Business Support Services
12.7%Health Care
5.38%Culture/
Recreation11.3%
Construction
Growth industries Employment trends
80.987.2 87.5
94.6 94.4 92.9
60.6 65 67.272.9 74 73.8
20.3 22.2 20.3 21.8 20.4 19.1
2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
Total Employment
Service Sector
Goods Producing Sector
Seen graphically, the breakdown of employment
by sector may produce some surprises.
Employment