 Starting all attendees are in listen-only mode. Good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to have you join us today for our webinar featuring a workforce development story from our BC Ideas Exchange Success Story collection. My name is Susan Lowe. I'm with the Design Coordination and Outreach Branch of the Ministry of Jobs, Trade and Technology. I'm providing technical support for today's session and moderating our Q&A session after the stories. I'm located in Victoria, BC on the unceded Coast Salish Territory of the Lithuanian and Lithuanian nations. Before we get started, I just want to let you know there's two ways to connect to the webinar for audio. If you have a headset or a microphone and speakers on your computer, you can choose computer audio, which is the default option. If you're concerned about bandwidth or you don't have computer audio or it seems to be malfunctioning, you can select phone call instead and dial-in information will be displayed. Make sure when you log into the phone system that you use the PIN number, which is unique to you, and that lets me mute or unmute your line if you want to speak later on in the webinar. A couple of things about our control panel. The orange arrow will hide or unhide the control panel and it hides itself automatically if you're not using it, so don't panic, we're not gone. You can go full screen with the blue square, the raise hands button lets me know that you want to talk or ask a question during the Q&A portions of the webinar. However, it is actually easier if you have a question to just enter it into the enter staff field and that will get my attention and I can read out your question or answer it directly in typing. We will have some polls on today's webinar to keep you engaged, so you'll need to put down your sandwich and engage. I'm going to run the first one here just as a test so you can see what it looks like. There we go, I'm going to launch it. The question is what kind of organization do you work for? Take a couple of minutes here to give us a little bit of info about where you're at, what kind of organization you're with. I usually leave these up for about 30 seconds, 45 seconds depending on how much voter turnout we get so I can see as people answer how many people have answered. We're at about 67 voter turnout right now which is not too bad, but the average for the price of the province of BC, I think we can do better. As we see a rise, we're now at 78%. We're now in a very civically engaged population for the webinar. That's fabulous. I'll leave it open for another couple of seconds and then I'm going to close it and here we go. Three, two, one, close it and I'll show you the results of it. You can see that 57% of the people on today's webinar are from local governments, municipal or regional. 43% are with the provincial government or magical other. We only get five choices so have to combine some of those. So carrying on. Today's webinar is about workforce development so by the end of your webinar today, your webinar experience, you will be able to describe how workforce development fits into a community active strategy you'll have heard about and be able to relate a BC-based community driven example of workforce development and you will have some ideas of actions that communities can take to advance workforce development in their local economy. After the story showcase and after Davin's presentation, I'm going to open things up for a bit of a peer-to-peer discussion but feel free to share an example of workforce development in our area or ask a question of the other people on the webinar who are also involved in the active field. So the audience is the expert here. I'm going to ask one more poll question before we get started. What I'd like to know is how important is workforce development to your community's economic development plans? I will launch this. This is a very basic rating scale. How important is workforce development for your community? There are only four choices you are going to have to when you can't go middle. Different kinds of economists will feel either happy or sad about the fact that I haven't provided you with a middle option. So the poll is complete. We have 100% voter turnout everyone. That is incredible. Someone's changing their vote. Someone's changing their vote here. We've got 90% voter turnout. Someone is thinking about it a little bit more. We had 100% voter turnout but I guess someone joined the webinar. They haven't voted quite yet but we've been up for 45 seconds here and this is speed polling time so I'm going to close this and share the results. So for 78% of our communities taking part in today's call, workforce development is extremely important which is probably why you're on today's webinar. For 11% it's quite important and another 11% moderately important and this is a good thing so it shows you are on the right webinar. All right. Carrying on. Our first presentation today will be with Kevin Poole and Richard Toperser who are coming to us live from Vernon within the Okanagan Indian Bands traditional territory. Kevin and Richard are collaborators on the Vernon and Area Workforce Development Roundtable. I'm not going to give an introduction for them because they can do it far better for themselves. They can tell you about themselves and what their initiative is doing. I'm going to change the presentation controls over to Kevin here and let him control his presentation and control your screens. Sure. I'm Kevin Poole, Manager of Economic Development and Tourism. I have the Tourism Portfolio as well for the City of Vernon and good morning everybody or I guess it's technically seven minutes afternoon so good afternoon everybody. My name is Richard Toperser. I'm a Regional Manager of Rural Development based here in Vernon. Yes and we are in the traditional territory of the ESEAC nation so thank you for having us this morning. So why are we here? Why is workforce development an issue? Well Kevin do you want to talk maybe a little bit about some of the data that you've been receiving through business walks and visits with companies and such? Yeah so we're part I'm sure many of you are part of the BC Business Counts program through the BC Economic Development Association. I think we're one of the second regions to do business walks but before that we've done sort of comprehensive business retention and expansion visits within the community and one of the key challenges that came up early on even back in 2010 when we started was the labor shortage and at that point it was probably more of a looming labor shortage so it's been identified very early on by our businesses. Perfect so 2014 was actually the first year that more people left the workforce than joined so this is not an issue that's going to go away that trend continues and it is the number one challenge for business attraction retention of labor regardless of the sector there's really only two ways that we've recognized to get labor so you either build it from within your community or you go outside of your community and attract it and then I guess the premise that we've been operating under as we've developed this workforce development round table is simply as individuals we transition through multiple phases of our life so we go through primary school and we transition into secondary. We then transition from secondary into post-secondary or maybe even the workforce and we'll probably transition between those two for the rest of our lives what we've found is that the employers and the institutions themselves do a great job of what they do and where we tend to lose people is during the transition so what we devised was a workforce development round table and really what that was is a way for the private sector and the public sector to come together develop relationships and manage those transitions so maybe Kevin we've got quite a quite a group at this round table and we're always looking for more space for meeting group spaces. It has definitely gotten bigger since Richard thought of the concept we've got a great working group here we call it vision north okanogan so it's the staff at a variety of different agencies that are on the business support services we meet on a monthly basis and this concept came forward and evolved into a lot of the service providers meeting going how do we meet the needs of business we're identifying this gap I think one thing we should know if we look at the census data in the Vernon area and I don't know if others have experienced the same thing but if you if you take the breakdown of the the new population and the demographics that we saw from say 01 up to 06 during some big boom years in this community we saw a lot of younger people coming to the area and then when we see the change into the 11 and into 2011 and 2016 census we saw still very strong growth but from an older demographic so that's creating a challenge for some of our employers so the fantastic part is when Richard said I'm going to put this workforce round table together and we'll see who we can reach out to we we reached out to a variety of our our private companies in the community and what I was amazed at is how many of them went yes this is a big issue for us so you can see just by that slide some of our larger larger corporates that we have in the community and from across sectors right so it didn't matter if it was manufacturing if it was tourism if it was technology really all of them were experiencing similar challenges and issues so we continue to add to this every time we talk to employers in town and they talk about the challenges that they're having trying to get skilled labor or even entry-level labor they want to come sit at this table as well and express their and share their challenges yeah and that's typically the challenge is the the engagement with the private sector but it certainly hasn't been much of a challenge at all so where have we been so in in the first couple of round table conversations we clearly identified four opportunities and I won't go into a lot of detail we do have a Vernon and area workforce development report which we're happy to share and it does go into a lot more detail around these four elements but also some strategies that we've employed to action these four elements so so the first was the relationships so we found very early in the conversation that the private sector and the public sector didn't have the most robust of relationships so tremendous amount of opportunity there to help build those relationships and again we have a whole bunch of activities which I won't go into that we've used to help kindle those relationships we also found that the narrative in the community was quite interesting so the narrative for a long time has been you can't do that here you can't have that great career you can't have that great job here in this in this area and nothing could be farther from the truth we have as you saw from the previous slide an amazing assortment of companies that all have an amazing assortment of career opportunities it's just we're not talking about it and so one of the goals is for us to start talking about it start sharing who is in town what opportunities they have and change that narrative about you can have a good career here exposure fits in well with the narrative so if we do have of these amazing employers how do we expose people to those opportunities that those employers have whether that's school kids whether that's high school kids whether that's kids in the local university or the college whether that's underemployed people that are looking to to bolster their skill sets how do we expose and expose them to those opportunities and create those relationships and then lastly it's about aligning the training with the opportunities that we have so we really look to the employers to articulate their skills needs and then we look to through this conversation align our local training capacity with those skills needs that's the importance of having the the ubco's okanagan college and now i think that's a big engagement that we got is school district both school districts 22 and also in the arm strong area 83 at the table to to be part of those conversations to the shape our children at a very early age that's right so i mentioned at the beginning there's two ways to get labor you can build it from within or you can go outside so let's talk a little bit about building it from within um kevin do you want to touch on the the job fair a little bit yeah so we've just uh we work with a group called nexus um that is one of our employment agencies here in town and they came up with the concept of of having a centralized job fair um right now a lot of our employers where we'll work we're very fortunate here our work bc program is delivered through our community futures office so we we've probably got one of the strongest and the largest community futures offices in in canada i think it is the largest in bc so it's a fantastic organization and great to work with but nexus a separate agency said let's let's do a larger instead of just one off uh employment opportunities or or companies coming into pitch maybe we do a job fair so that has grown and i think we're year three this year that we did just back in april there was over 40 employers that attended and we had about 680 attendees come up to the event so it's fantastic in just three years absolutely so some of the uh things that we've accomplished on the building from within focus is uh i've got to give kudos to the school district so through the round table conversation they've shown great leadership they've actually created a brand new position in the school district that they didn't have before it's a district's principle of career education and that role is to be the liaison with the private sector so we can help the kids understand opportunities and that that's really uh led to a whole host of activities like kids going out to employers places of work and doing facility tours employers coming into schools we've seen mentorships and career panels um work experience job shadowing internships co-op and one of the things we're working on right now is a tech meet-up some communities have that where they put the spotlight on the tech sector and they have the kids play with all the different toys that the local tech companies create and discover and then the job fair is obviously uh that kevin mentioned another example of what we've accomplished is work bc to their credit has changed the way they do business so they're doing things like onsite job fairs for employers so their clientele are coming and going and they have employers set up right there in the building that their clientele can meet with on the spot uh they also have focus groups and they're creating uh sector opportunities focusing on positions so for example uh non-profit caregivers uh not a lot of those to choose from so working with their clientele and finding a good fit for that type of role and then of course the the organizations that need those roles okanagan college um i talked about aligning the training with the skills needs so they've done a great job of identifying the skills gaps you know one of the and of course with the dual credits um a lot of a lot more dual credits uh coming with the with the high schools uh but one example that we've seen that's really overwhelming is uh so there's a need for insulators as part of construction and they have created an insulator certificate and not only is there a high demand here in the okanagan and the vernin area for that because it's a very unique course but we've got companies from ontario phoning the college saying we'll take your graduating class we'll fly them out here and pay their relocation expenses so not exactly our goal it speaks to the demand for sure the college is actually being being fantastic i know uh many from a municipal level are struggling and implementing bylaws and how they're going to deal with the cannabis industry and i know from uh um from a licensed producer aspect we did approach the college and and uh just named the ones that i know in the in the region in the north okanagan that are going through the process to get their health canada approvals and i was amazed on how many there were and and i think okanagan college like a little little behind quantlin college is really stepped up fast but the okanagan college is looking the same thing of how they can help on the training aspect all the way from the grill the science and research side which we're really interested in all the way to the retail aspect so uh it's great to have a college that jumps on board south of the camp yeah very nimble uh and then a couple last things just on the internal focus so we've seen a lot of development of intercompany relationships so again with a roster of 40 companies sitting at the table it's a lot of opportunity for them to get to know each other we've seen some labor sharing because of that you know a summer winter seasonal labor sharing you know silver star uh predator ridge as an example uh doing some labor sharing and then our indigenous community partners uh we have two indigenous communities that sit at the table and we've really seen um some great strides in those communities uh developing relationships with employers as well and working on training initiatives and working on employment initiatives so that leads us to the next focal point which is about attracting people from outside the community and and there were some foundational elements that needed to happen for this to be able to occur and we'll let kevin talk a little bit about those yeah we we've got a ways to go I think uh when I look at the work that pal river's done and a lot of communities that have done the resident attraction side or specific segments I know quinella's done a great job on the physician recruitment there's others throughout the province that have some great examples of of what they've done uh I looked at penticton on their start here okanagan uh initiative that we're going to chat with more about what central okanagan we've done there's a lot of communities that are really in this people attraction and professional attraction to the community so we just launched a new website within the city site but I'm moving to vernin website in january in a real partnership with our uh our social planning council who's taken advantage of the the lips program the local immigration partnership and before that the welcome bc program that we've participated in as well so we've got a great relationship there and it's allowed us to to utilize some funding and meet a need that the employers have said you know all those 40 employers at the table said it's one thing for them to reach out and try to attract skilled labor but they need a community portal to highlight the breadth of job opportunities within the region I think a big one actually we had our economic development advisory committee meeting today we had accelerate okanagan come out and and recognize that even then especially on the tech front we need to spread our our reach a little further to ensure that we're including colonna in in our job opportunities as we move forward to make sure that people coming to vernin colonna it's 45 minutes between the two communities and the more jobs we can show and highlight more career paths is going to lead to some great opportunities absolutely and it also speaks to the the hidden professional work that you're doing yeah maybe we'll move to the the next one so we're still new when they attract from the outside but it's definitely something that we we see a lot of partnerships with our private sector and players and they're truly supportive and yes that is that's cal Lake it's not the Caribbean so we're very fortunate to live here so we think we should just be able to put that picture up and people will move but so far it's close we've got another roundtable coming up in in July so shortly we've got a great couple good concepts in the agenda Richard can speak to the p&p and the international trade pilot opportunity but one that we're working on right now we're just launching a survey hopefully we'll get out this week or early next week is is we're trying to locate our hidden professionals so those are the ones that are working in your community out of their home or basically the untraditional office space so they're either they're the remote workers or they're professionals that are exporting a service so they just simply choose to live in your community so we're trying to get one bit of an economic indicator of what they're providing because essentially they're all little mini manufacturing companies or many uh exporters that they're uh exporting in a trade or a skill set and in part two we're trying to find out what do they need how can we help from a municipal standpoint and trying to uh to support their needs as they hopefully grow and do they need incubation services do they want to work with other people that you know the social isolation that you may face in your home so there's a lot of opportunities there and I think the employers recognize that too there's also a skill set that they may be able to breach out of that home office that's working remotely right into their company into a corporate like a caltire or toco that we have here like a supply chain opportunity absolutely yeah so on in our july roundtable we are focusing about going outwards we partnered as Kevin mentioned with the local immigration partnership um it makes a lot of sense to do that and when we talk about going outside of the community it could be as close as Kelowna it could be as far as Indonesia I think the conversation at the roundtable will determine what that looks like but it's really about putting the spotlight on Vernon telling folks what we have in so far as career opportunities what kind of skills we need and being able to clearly articulate that and do it in a coordinated manner and one of the ways that we've been exploring and again this is early days of how to do that is through our provincial nominee program and through our international trade in market folks so we've as most people know and have worked with them in the past we've got people uh in in europe and states in china and indonesia all over the world that represent first columbia so we're working with those two organizations to see are we able to funnel if we can articulate the skills needs for the employers in the community can we use and access those international trade in market folks to funnel people into the pnt program and then we can use our local immigration partnership to land them here in the community and welcome to the community and get them settled so just something that we're working on and i think the conversation we're really looking forward to seeing where where it goes and and what shining the spotlight on Vernon might look like in so far as skills attraction so that was a quick skate over the pond of what we're doing maybe not so quick as always we're happy to discuss and you can reach out to either of us anytime or ask questions if we have time here today so over to you susan thank you for giving us this opportunity thanks you guys that was a really engaging presentation i love the uh the birds i view we have on you guys and the glare this is amateur this is this is not uh professional this is not ctv on hollywood this is not the news now or this is uh this is active in practice uh so thank you very much you guys for for sharing that um i want to give an opportunity for people who are watching the webinar if they have any questions to uh either put a question into the question field or raise your hand and i'll i'll try and spot you in my list of attendees here for anyone who wants to ask a question about uh the Vernon and area of course development round table uh bit of a cheeky question for you uh how often do you have to repeat all of those syllables and have you considered branding that one's directed at Richard are we talking about my ministry name or are we talking about the round table the round table name let's leave the ministry name out of it okay because we could go either way on that one so uh yeah no we we haven't gotten to the branding portion of the agenda yet i i think that's more just an internal piece um you know it's right now we're focused on the external marketing of the community and and the opportunities in it but thank you for the question great thank you and while i threw you that complete puffball question uh thankfully one of our attendees has actually asked a real question uh and that is uh how often does the round table meet and can you speak a bit more about how you help foster relationships between the public and private sector sure so um we've been meeting i think the conversation started about two years ago and we've been meeting about three times a year on average we don't uh we don't meet too often because we really focus the round table conversations on guidance for us in the private sector on what we need to do in the interim between meetings and we want to be able to you know not waste people's time uh and and demonstrate uh some things that um that we've done to to move move along we've got opportunities that we've utilized for little sub-meetings right even on the website i know when we just drafted a bunch of material uh we just pulled in a focus group of some of our major employers and said what what do you think you know what are your thoughts on changes we need to make so they've given us a whole host of ideas they want us to incorporate more imagery more videos maybe company profiles all of the great suggestions right they had fantastic information for us that we can do outside the round table and then as i mentioned we've got this vision north okanagan group so if there's items that come up that's more specific to where the service providers can uh to work together to uh to assist with an issue then we've got that table that we we meet monthly at that table that we can discuss those concepts so you know the i'd say the the relationships are developed firstly at the table of just getting to know everyone uh but and it is a true round table so it's not a talking head it's a conversation within the room amongst all uh and i would say the relationships are further kindled by the different organizations doing different things so i talked a little bit about college they've asked some of the employers as an example to be on an advisory group to help advise uh their their skills training agenda um we've seen work bc uh ask employers or offer two employers you know we'll have an onsite uh job fair for you as an employer and and worked on relationships there so what what can we do to help and how can we help you same with the high school we've seen a lot of employers coming into the high school and talking to kids and kids getting bused out and employers are actually paying for the buses for the kids to go out and visit uh their place in the world an example of that so that it is all just relationships and often in economic development that's what it is right you're a connection point to others right to say if you need to contact here then here's a here's a connection you two need to connect right and and in this one that's what the round table is allowed i think of king fisher and their hr uh sarah sarah okay i got it right so anyway sarah at king fisher boats so they they manufacture boats aluminum welding is what they do and they have a high need for aluminum welders which is a real specialty trade that they often train onsite uh for the welders that come through the program um they're huge in the apprenticeship apprenticeship side and the school district has their own apprenticeship committee they do trade samplers with the college they got they got an excellent resource they brought two buses full of kids out within a very quick sarah said i will pay for the buses and bring kids out and within a week school district had two buses on the road bringing kids out for a tour of king fisher so that speaks back to one of those challenges that richard was saying is people are often brought up in this area of all it's a great place to live but there's no jobs right so when we were able to link that back and have the kids go onsite have a tour of one of our largest boat builders in yoke and augin and and uh and have that experience they go wow there is some opportunities here that i don't have to leave the oil fields i can i can do those things here yeah great thank you guys i have a question for you and then we'll move on to our next speaker um what kind of metrics or do you do what kind of indicators do you use or look at to see if you're moving the needle you know it's a great question and and uh i i think a lot about this but the the fundamental for me comes down to engagement so if nobody shows up you're probably not doing it right um if everybody consistently shows up and again we've been at this for two years we've had consistently that room has been full and and it's not the typical room where you have a lot of you know public sector folks yeah sitting there talking to each other there are more private sector people than there are public sector people in the room that to me the is the important metric because they're taking their valuable time and they're they're demonstrating they're getting some from it and i think we've got a lot to build on right we can track everything with the website that we've launched so we started doing that as well but i see us going likely to what we're and jennifer did it at the bca eba conference did a fantastic job on their start here okanagan project that they've worked when they went another step further they started posting jobs they started getting the uh employee side that is looking for opportunities so then then you're getting some real connections that you can have that metric side to say actually you know what we started matching these employers and employees i think that's that's where we want to go long term that's where we want to go next conversation yeah maybe i shouldn't say long term short term thank you very much you guys that was a really useful presentation i'm gonna just take back the controls here so i can introduce our next speaker and i'm glad to see that dovein got his webcam working again after i turned it off on him using my organizer powers so the next presentation we're going to have is with davin greenwell from the ministry of advanced education and skills training and he's going to show us and share with us information about the find your fit tour which is one of those things that communities can use as a tool to it's a workforce development tool that is about as much information and davin can introduce himself a little bit more i'm just going to send the screen controls over to davin coming your way awesome great thank you okay so i am actually going to fire up my powerpoint here can you still see me over there i can see you yeah and we see your presentation okay okay awesome so like sue mentioned uh my name is davin greenwell i'm the manager of client engagement it's the ministry of advanced education skills and training and my files that i'm responsible for include work bc welcome bc and i'm also the ministry lead on work bc is find your fit youth tour i work in the workforce innovation and division responsible for skills training and fitting all of that on a business card is challenging so i usually just tell people i i work on a really cool project that goes across the the province and helps youth discover the jobs of tomorrow that's it uh condensed but how do we do that and why do we do it um so in this division i work in we actually are in the same branch as the province's chief economist who works on the labor market outlook the tenure projections of jobs and demand and that's an aggregate of of stats can data projections industry needs and emerging trends including automation that kind of thing and it's it's really amazing data but it's useless unless people have access to it and can understand it um and and that's true about any data so our mission is well how do we make this successful how do we engage people with it so that in the context of workforce development people are looking at careers and understanding what kind of opportunities they are and accessing education and training so their skills and knowledge development and their abilities development map out to the reality of what workforce development requires in the future so the first piece i want to get to here is our website workbc.ca it was created with one key mission in mind which is to be the provincial government's access point to the world of work in bc um and it it's there's there's many aspects to how we do that one of the ways we do that is we share labor market information we have the labor market outlook which we just mentioned that's on our website high demand occupations we have a career toolkit a number of different things including 500 different career profiles with detailed information including average salary job openings links to actual job openings on our website through the workbc job board and one of the really interesting things um on the career toolkit is career track which are day in the life five minute videos of what it's like to do different jobs and they're all shot here in bc and these are real british columbians doing different jobs and it's a it's a way to gain interest or garner interest in different occupations and raise awareness of you know what what does the mill rate do uh what's the day in the life of an accountant uh what do they get over the job why why do they do it um and so that that links to um job post things uh it links to infographics and it helps people understand what skills and qualifications are required and um one more note on the workbc job board there's also something called the community jobs api which is uh an application programming interface which essentially allows anyone with a website and a job board to pipe the workbc jobs that are based in their community to their community job board so that's that's a useful thing and you can find that on our website i won't get too much into that right now because it's pretty technical but it's definitely a very useful thing to have access to so our topic is workforce development and it's helpful to go with a definition that we can all share and understand and i'm speaking to the experts already but it's important to to know why we do what we do and so we're looking at assisting youth and adults and acquiring knowledge and developing skills beyond the basic education program so they can enter the workforce in in a way that maps out to what industry is looking for and that helps people if they know what their options are find meaningful work in areas that will be gainful to not just them but also the industry and this is important in the context of the changing economy we all know that technology changes things but there's a number of other factors that also will change the economy so it's not a set it and forget it kind of thing it's an ongoing thing and it's a thing that you know we all need to keep our eyes on so what is find your fit we call it experiential learning it's a hand on hands on activities from different parts of the economy we have a number of different activity stations and they're paired with labor market information some of the activity stations appear to be gains however all of the different activities are mapped out to different occupations and the skills required to participate in one of these activity stations map out to those occupation groups as well so somebody finds they're good at something they can explore more labor market information this was launched in may 2014 and has become an integral part of our work bc outreach programming so what kind of activities are there and what kind of occupations are people looking at in this experience so we have a list here I won't read them all you can see there's a number from a different from different areas of the economy different industries and we what we do is we regionalize this so in areas where there are more jobs in demand in a certain sector we regionalize it to that area and we have a list of regionalized that jobs in demand that we get from our labor market information office so it's a we're using data for this to make sure that we're aligned with the regions so there's two types there's activity stations those are the hands-on ones where students use any participant really can get hands-on experience and see what it's actually like to do some of these occupations they're not a hundred percent what it would be like to do you know be like to do that job but it's some of them are simulations and some of them are exercises put you in the frame of mind of somebody that would do that job it's a big difference to just hear a job title and see information on the screen it's versus actually going through and using those skills yourself and seeing you know do I like to use these skills am I good at this I might be good at something I never even considered before never even heard of something we hear about a lot from parents and teachers and students well mostly parents and teachers principals and so on and people in the community is I wish we had this when we were in high school it would have made a big difference and and I feel the same way we didn't have this we had like a quiz told me I could be a bus driver I probably still could so what kind of activation types do we have how do we actually do this so our full activation for find your fit is about 15 to 16 different stations it's enough to fill an entire gymnasium it's giant it takes about four hours to set up and take down we have a semi trailer truck full of these different stations and so because of that it requires quite a bit of planning in advance with either the school or the community space and we have to negotiate around you know if there's a volleyball practice the night before they need the gym so that's not a good day that kind of thing and but once it's set up it's it's a full experience and you'll see in the video we're we're going to show in a couple minutes here what that means our find your fit booth activation usually shows up at community events where there's less space it's typically two 10 by 10 booths with the middle station removed we have about three to five stations in that smaller space the interactions are a bit faster because there's less to go through but we we try to make sure that those stations are relevant to the region or community that we're setting up in and I say fit faster interactions the full activation for find your fit is typically a 45 minute interaction for each individual and that can include a discussion with some of our youth outreach workers that are there at each of the stations and can talk to the participants more about you know this occupation they find they're good at this occupation and the skills that it requires what does it mean to actually go to school for that or to training institution and how long will that be and what is the labor market outlook for that particular job will there be jobs when I graduate it's a common question but these conversations are happening in those 45 minutes and the more stations that participants can go through the more they can have an understanding of what skills are in demand and what knowledge and what qualifications the other activation we do is relatively new and our friends in Vernon know about this it's called career education day we've had a few of them and they're they're pretty new we have about seven to eight of the interactive stations and the other half of the gymnasium is or the community center is is set up for three types of partner booths and this these ones are meant for participants to be I suppose a bit more mature in their career development and skills development conversation so this one's usually meant for grades 10 to 12 as opposed to the find your fit regular tour which is meant for grades 5 through 10 career education day brings career sorry education partners industry partners as well as support organizations by education partner I mean higher education including universities colleges local training institutions polytechnics and for industry we're talking about local businesses so students can be face to face with local employers and get a concrete understanding of what it is that businesses and organizations who are hiring in general are looking for and how to close that gap for skills and qualifications and what I mean by support organizations so local entrepreneurship organizations if students are looking at starting their own business they need to know what's available to them work bc ita the industry training authority go to hr and what we what our goal here is if students are getting a bit further into this space of looking at developing a career how can they actually meet some people that will help them get there and and we're really aiming to demystify it not all students get this experience I know I didn't when I was in high school and we want to provide something for them that makes it not not necessarily easier but more familiar and they know how to navigate it better and they have they can actually start making some of those connections I think the face to face makes a big difference so who participates like I mentioned in the previous slide for find your fit it's designed and developed for students grades five through ten and that has to do with the way we write some of the copy on the materials it's also meant for how we design the activity so it's not too advanced but advanced enough that it actually is relevant for career education days where we have the partners as students grades 10 through 12 and that is because of the type of conversations that are happening there they're they're ready for a bit more there and a few metrics here so since May 2014 here's the number of interactions of direct interactions not just people walking by but direct interactions and conversations that we've had about 210 000 youth have interacted with us 63 000 and six adults so it's not just for kids this is labor market information this is career development this is about it can be about career transition for a more mature worker and quite often parents will come along with their kids as well we do evening sessions that are open to the public and parents will come along with their kids or kids will drag their parents back to it out of interest so that's a 273 000 total interaction since May 2014 so we're really focused on getting out there actually where have we been I can't look at this list without getting a certain commercial jingle stuck in my head because we've been everywhere in BC we've almost reached all school districts that's our goal for this year 115 communities 313 activations and we're really proud of that the map on your right shows you last year's map in terms of where we got to and right now we're planning for September through next March so what's the outcome well you hear about big data all the time and we're in the information age firmly so the question is how do you put big data in the hands of some of the most important decision makers when it comes to workforce development which are youth earlier and the reason why we have packaged up labor market information in this way is precisely to pique interest with the younger decision makers about how they're going to get qualified where they're going to go to school where they want to live and work and play so when we connect students and youth and people who are looking for that next step with the next 10 years of labor projections jobs and demand they have they have a much better understanding about you know how they can connect what they love to do with what's in demand and I think that's a profoundly powerful thing to do why would we wait until later to share this information or why wouldn't we package it in a way that's accessible earlier so better decisions could be made earlier and fill some of these gaps that industry and business and organizations are telling us exist and this is reflected in the data as well as as mentioned earlier so we connect them once they they know what they want to do we connect them with education planners so they can see what schools and institutions offer specific programs locally for what they want to do and the education planners great website that has every post-secondary institution in bc's programs and once a participant is zeroed in on an occupation we bring up our work bc career profile it links to a specialized link on education planner that shows all the programs in bc that relate to that occupation and then they can they can start that conversation at career education days sometimes this means that a student will come in not knowing what they want to do finding something they really like talking to somebody that does it for a living and the educational institution is in the same room and they register on the same day this is this is fast-moving stuff so we're really proud of when that kind of stuff happens and i i think it's it's truly meaningful where can you find out more visit workbc.ca slash find your fit and we've got a photo gallery up there we have a calendar of upcoming events you can request a tour stop for your community and we've also got a few different things including teacher resources that kind of thing for pre and post visit learnings but it's it's good to know where it's going already our calendar of events is is up to date for the summer and it will show you where we're going in terms of community events some of the the full activations will start in september and october and it'll go straight through until march oh and why don't i show you a video of what it looks like in the community hey devin i'm gonna try uh showing it from my screen to see if it works better okay i think it may need a organizer to share it uh okay and uh uh well i haven't run into this problem before i changed computers it worked yesterday on my other computer so i i guess we're not going to get it because i i actually do not know what that error message means unfortunately okay some kind of security thing so unfortunately we can't do that but i know that if if people are wanting to see the video uh you've got a pretty good it's easily googled right it's on the website i just mentioned workbc.ca slash find your fit so just click on about and you'll see it okay great well apologies that and then i have one last wanted oh okay well let me just give you the slide control back then here we go it's a really important one oh yes it's how to reach you here it is can you see it thank you very much yes thank you thanks for having me i hope that was useful yeah i think it was i'm gonna open it up for uh questions from our audience as well uh now i thought i had a question of course it has disappeared from my mind from time being um so i i think my question was going to be um how do how can people get on your tour if they want to have you come and be covered that you can request it through the website um i'm also gonna bring back um kevin and richard and see if they want to participate if anyone has questions for either of our speakers today or wants to ask any workforce development question um you can put up your hand or type a question into our question box um while i wait for people to do that i actually have one more poll that i want to ask people to participate in uh and just to get an idea of what kind of worker workforce development activities different communities have under way so if you've been nibbling on your sentiments you're checking your email come on back to your screen and there's a question for you to answer do you have any of these development activities underway industry education partnerships uh pre-employment training programs on-the-job training programs worker attraction or retention and other stuff not mentioned here if you've got other stuff going on and you want to type it into the questions for staff i can collect those up as well gives us an idea of what different communities have underway i was just doing a scan of our bc ideas exchange uh story collection and noticing that we actually have quite a few different workforce development initiatives um kind of have to seek through our story collection i'm going to work on on building another uh index so that it's easier to find these but you may in fact have things that you don't know fall under the title of workforce development but they really are um so we're also going to uh later this fall we will have a couple more of bc ideas exchange webinars and we're going to be sharing um the story of the bc film the tv and film career training program north island college uh later this year so we've got 75 voter turnout which i think is pretty fabulous thank you very much everyone for participating i'm just going to share the results here so we can see um interesting and not everyone is doing everything but uh someone somewhere is doing each of these so um we've got a pretty interesting range of things uh under the the heading of workforce development initiatives thank you very much everyone for taking part in the poll um i haven't got any more questions coming in right now so uh rather than uh carry on oh i'm going to change the presenter back to me here we go so with an absence of other uh questions coming in oh there we go uh we have an opportunity for discussion but i think probably people are ready uh to go back to their lives now that lunch hour is over um i'm going to thank everyone for participating tonight thank you um richard and kevin and bernan your web cams turned off but i know you're still there um thanks very much thank you thanks for having our show today um i'm just going to highlight um we will i'm just working on uh plans to do one more webinar in the summertime i can't announce the date right now but it is going to be very exciting for those smaller communities who are looking for funding there's a big hint dropped for you uh so stay tuned for that that will be coming up sometime in the next few weeks actually we're going to try and get it rolling as fast as we can before a certain deadline at the end of july there's another big hint for you what it might be about um the the tech dev 101 series will be continuing in september and october there's the the links to register for them if you want to i'm in the middle of planning the fall winter 2018 2019 webinar schedule so if you have something specific that you'd like to see you know a great story that we should highlight uh you have a burning desire to see a topic that we've done in a past webinar revisited and updated uh please email me it's really easy economic development at gov dot bc dot ca so over the next two or three weeks i'm going to be establishing what the schedule is through to december um there's always room to throw an extra party uh everyone likes a good webinar so we will always make room if there's more topics that come up um i'll i'll hint we've got stuff coming on social enterprise and cooperatives probably we're also going to be having a session on connectivity for smaller communities and i know that's been one demand and i'm going to be working on sessions that talk about first nations and municipal collaborations and understanding the first nations land use and financial management acts and how to build good partnerships so uh oh that's what i'm talking about there's the slide to go with it so if you'd like to be a speaker or you have specific requests send me an email um and if you want to make sure that you're getting those invitations um write down this short uh url and make sure that you add yourself to our invitation list um this is how we send out the the notices so get on the list um there will be a feedback survey coming out about this webinar uh the recording of the webinar will be posted in about a week to our website um another thing that will be happening this summer is i'm going to be sending out a webinar survey sort of for the whole how we've done this spring since i started and i want to find out things about what do you think about the topics um about the platform about the time of day that we do it and so the more feedback i get on that the happier i can make you as our webinar listeners um yeah that is all she wrote folks thank you very much also to davin uh and kevin and richard for for joining us today on the webinar and i'll see you and i see all of you fine folks in the community in a couple of weeks when we have our next one and happy summer thanks for having us great thank you thank you bye bye