HR professionals across our industry are increasingly adding a new skill set to their repertoire: data science.

Whether we love it or loathe it, our ability to recruit and retain good people is fully intertwined with the realities of Canada’s skilled labour force, and the conditions that threaten our ability to grow.

Here’s what we know to be true:

We know that an aging population will create a significant gap in available tradespeople. According to June 2023 survey data, there are 8.5 million workers—in all sectors—above the age of 45. When we couple this with decades of low birth rates and low immigration numbers, we have a sizeable gap in our workforce that is emerging. We know that while many industries—like food service and healthcare—will feel the brunt of this, so too will businesses like ours, that employ skilled tradespeople.

The attraction of tradespeople is a pipeline issue. We simply have fewer young workers choosing a trade as their profession. The consequences of this ripple far beyond our sector. Tradespeople are the key to unlocking our economic potential. Without them, not only do we threaten the growth potential of private business, but also the infrastructure and development projects that are becoming increasingly imperative to the public interest.

At CDN Controls, we are in the midst of rapid growth—growth we attribute to a balanced ecosystem of unabashed ambition, an unwavering commitment to our core values, unrelenting pride in quality work, and a stringent focus on cultivating and sustaining meaningful relationships. In 12 years, we’ve grown to 10 branch locations, eight core services, two acquisitions, and 700 people. Our biggest threat to our growth trajectory now is our ability to continue growing—and maintaining—our workforce of skilled tradespeople.

The playbook becomes: recruit, retain, champion.

On the recruitment side, we have no choice but to become part of the ongoing wage inflation. Competition for talent has intensified. We must meet this with salary growth and a total rewards package that includes future-focused options like RRSPs, progressive leave policies, and development opportunities. We must expand recruitment to new markets, including those where we do not offer services—an ambitious project for our public relations team because it requires regionally-specific messages that appeal to a variety of local talent pools. And we must set an unprecedented standard in the speed of our onboarding, balancing the due diligence of safety training with the expediency to get new employees working.

On the retention side, we have to think not just about what people do, but what they experience. Our people have chosen CDN—and Exile Automation which we acquired in 2011—to be the place where they offer their professional gift. They chose us as the place to grow, the place to build relationships and friendships, and the place to show what they can do—and how well they can do it. How we honour and invest in this has never mattered more. We have to be humbled by this reality, and it must form the foundation of how we invest in their growth as an extension of our own.

Today, half of our leadership team are skilled men and women promoted from our field operations. The other half are the result of meaningful recruitment efforts to find innovative and forward-thinking leaders. Together, they learn from each other, never losing the balance between the pragmatic realities of our business and the unexplored potential of what has not yet been considered in our industry sector. Through the leadership of the People & Culture team, we also invest in having them learn together, using every gathering opportunity to develop skills, tools, resiliency, and capacity as a collective - recognizing their differences in approach remains a strength to CDN, and demonstrating that our potential is reached together. We want this model to be seen by every employee that chooses to work for CDN— their investment in us has a visible model to become our investment in them. We offer it. And they can see it in action.

Recruitment and retention alone cannot address the systemic shortages that are eminent. To address this, we must become champions for skilled tradespeople. We must showcase the role tradespeople play in our current economic potential—and the undeniable value they will provide in the energy transition ahead. We must tell the stories of the value they provide to Canadians’ everyday lives and publicly hold accountable any rhetoric that marginalizes a career in trades as lesser—or a second choice to traditional, academic post-secondary schooling.  We must show the remarkable skillset they provide, from their numeracy and mathematics abilities to some of the most independent thinking and teamwork skills we’ll ever encounter. As we celebrate their contributions, we must also make smart investments in making the pathway into the trades that much easier, by supporting organizations that promote women and underrepresented groups to join a trade, and making long-term investments in scholarship opportunities that reduce the financial burden for education. Simply stated: in places where we talk about the future of our work, we want trades expansion to be a part of this conversation.

That’s the future focus of my work—to be the champion, and to create space where we can all belong in that conversation.

CDN Controls

CDN Controls is Western Canada’s leader in electrical and instrumentation maintenance, automation, communication, and renewable/solar services. United by a shared belief that clients are best served by a service provider in the relentless pursuit of solving challenges through impactful relationships and partnerships, CDN’s collective team of 700 employees and contractors are committed to the highest standards in performance, measurement, and safety. With 9 branches in Alberta and British Columbia, and six formal Indigenous partnerships, CDN Controls delivers systems that perform.