Course offerings diversify to boost career choices

Positions in sustainability are attracting growing numbers of seasoned professionals seeking new opportunities and students who want rewarding, socially responsible work. This area is also big business. Often backed by government funding, the sector is seen as stable with growing value, given its transformative role in the economy.

Indeed, the Globe Foundation of Canada has estimated in a recent study that British Columbia’s green economy – in which it comprises production of clean and alternative energy, energy management, green building, environmental protection, carbon finance and investment and green knowledge – could represent $27.4 billion in economic activity and employ 225,000 persons both directly and indirectly by 2020: approximately 80,000 more than in 2008 (the most recent year for which statistics are available).

Small wonder job-seekers are excited.

“It hasn’t seen the same downturn as some other [sectors],” says Grant Trump, founding president and chief executive officer of the Environmental Careers Organization of Canada (ECO Canada), a national group headquartered in Calgary that focuses on employment in the environmental sector. Green jobs, he says, have been resilient amid recession because of significant stimulus funding that governments have directed toward compatible activities. Remediation in the oilsands and further north in the territories has attracted $3.1 billion in federal funding. Companies have also taken interest in greening operations.

“There’s an increase in work going on. Environment is by no means recessionary-poof, but it is a little more recessionary-resistant because it’s regulatory-driven,” Trump says.

The sector’s stability and growth are reflected in the attraction by universities and colleges of increasing numbers of students to the field and in their expansion of course offerings.

Demand helped spark the formation in April 2009 of the faculty of environment at Simon Fraser University (SFU), where dean John Pierce oversees 200 graduate students and a plethora of undergraduate programs in environmental science, in geography, in the School of Resource and Environmental Management and in the Centre for Sustainable Community Development.

Among the issues students learn to address, he says, are the challenges posed by renewable energy. He notes that professionals will need more than engineering backgrounds to realize rapid growth in this field and apply it successfully to lowering environmental impact.

ECO Canada cites technological, managerial and communications skills as being among the most important attributes for employees seeking green-collar jobs. To these, Pierce adds critical thinking and the ability to weigh different options.

Graduates should be able to conduct and understand environmental-impact assessments and similar analyses not only of how projects work but also of how they fit into broader ecosystems. Understanding land-use planning and other development issues also counts.

“There’s no question that we’re in a growth environment, and the more credentials we can get recognized here, the more comfortable we’re going to feel in terms of placing students,” Pierce says.

It’s a need that BC Colleges, which represents the province’s 11 publicly funded community colleges, appreciates. While its members focus most often on practical skills, they’re expanding courses to reflect the ascendance of renewable-energy projects in the areas they serve.

Geography students in hydrology, as well as environments and society courses at Northwest Community College in Terrace have examined the implications of a run-of-river hydro project that Vancouver-based Swift Power Corp. is proposing for the Shames River.

“The hydrological part of the project is to determine the flow potential of Shames River to generate hydroelectricity as a [run-of-river] project,” instructor Gord Weary said in a description of the program from the college. “The social-environmental part of the project is to determine both the positive and [the] negative consequences of this type of development in the watershed.”
Practical experience exposes students to the potential impact of such projects, from environmental implications to community responses.

At Northern Lights College in Dawson Creek, students study maintenance of wind turbines. The course reflects the sector’s emergence as an alternative to gas exploration, long a regional economic mainstay. Debuting in February 2010 with 16 students, the wind-turbine maintenance technician program is a cornerstone of the college’s Centre of Excellence for Clean Energy Technologies. To the training common for millwrights and electricians, it adds a component on wind turbines.

At Okanagan College’s Penticton campus, a two-year apprenticeship program for geothermal technicians recently launched that will find a home in the college’s Centre of Excellence in Sustainable Building Technologies and Renewable Energy Conservation, set to open in March 2011. Geothermal energy has been key to the sustainable credentials claimed by many buildings in the Okanagan as well as in the Lower Mainland. (For more on the Centre of Excellence, see page 35.)

With so many opportunities for learning, identifying the key sectors of opportunity for careers is a challenge.

“A lot of other employment areas are quite mechanically, rigidly task-oriented. In general, environment doesn’t fall into that category,” Trump says. “The whole concept of environmental employment is that it is multidisciplinary and … cross-sectoral.”

Michael Dayan, chief officer, communi­cations and strategy, at the Vancouver-based Green Collar Association, refers to green-collar jobs broadly as those having “a net benefit on the environment. These include the efforts of white-collar professionals such as lawyers and accountants as well as blue-collar labourers such as electricians and plumbers.”

Referencing federal numbers, Dayan says B.C. ranks third in Canada for green-collar employment, with the largest proportion of green jobs being in administration and support, waste management, and remediation. Agriculture, forestry and fishing collectively reported the second-greatest concentration of green-collar jobs.

Regarding the next two years, Dayan reports that data gathered by the Green Collar Association suggests that positions in waste management and water quality will grow 12 and 11 per cent, respectively, while the sectors addressing energy will post eight per cent growth and air and land quality seven.

Helmut Pastrick, chief economist at Central 1 Credit Union, notes that electric-power engineering and construction activities increased almost 19 per cent in 2009 and that this bodes well for ongoing job opportunities in renewable energy.

To meet demand, courses such as those offered by SFU, Northwest Community College and others will be valuable, but Dayan says workers shouldn’t overlook opportunities to apply their existing skills into alternative sectors: “People in the labour force do not always recognize the easy transferability of their skills. For example, people with the skillset that enables them to drill for oil are also in a position to easily transfer their skills to drilling for geothermal energy.”

West Vancouver engineer and consultant Roger Bayley says that general social awareness is bringing people into the environmental field in search of opportunities and new applications of their skills.

“There is constant expression of interest going on from a wide range of different organizations and groups about this kind of development,” he says. While such interest hasn’t always translated into concrete action, Bayley believes the community is beginning “to head up there now as knowledge and interest … build.”

Regarding research and development, government incentives for new companies and interest from private equity are also creating employment opportunities. Clean tech’s attractiveness to financing brightens its employment landscape.

“The availability of capital will drive employment opportunities,” says Pascal Spothelfer, president and chief executive officer, BC Technology Industry Association. That venture capital can be deployed into the field “bodes well for employment growth.”

By Peter Mitham