In its latest labour market white paper, the PEI BioAlliance predicts that Prince Edward Island’s life sciences cluster will employ 3,000 people by 2025 and lays out its plans to create an HR Excellence Initiative to advocate for HR best practices. 

The BioAlliance releases an HR strategy document every five years, and the fourth edition aims to help address the sector’s ongoing staffing crunch. Dubbed HR Strategy 2025: Breaking Barriers - Driving Growth, It reports the sector has grown about 60 percent since 2015 and now employs about 2,200 people. The industry hires about 350 people a year, up dramatically from 100 per year in 2018.

A frequent theme in HR Strategy 2025 is the impact of systemic labour market issues on companies’ abilities to hire and retain staff. In response, the BioAlliance plans to “aggressively” market the sector to potential workers.

“Recruitment is our most comprehensive focus as it is critical in supporting company growth and in enabling new companies to establish a presence in Prince Edward Island,” says the report.

“Retention has (also) become a growing challenge so we must build best practices to retain well-matched and vital talent needed for companies to thrive.”

HR Strategy 2025 describes a fast-growing industry hungry for more talent than it can readily access, with companies struggling with rising turnover rates, a particular dearth of entry-level staff and difficulty raising money because investors question whether founders can execute on their visions without adequate supplies of employees.

But the report also describes a failure of companies to adequately market themselves to students, which startup observers regularly describe as one of the most viable solutions to the labour shortage.

More students are employed by government organizations like Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada than by for-profit life sciences companies. And while the federal and provincial governments have expanded their slate of wage subsidy programs to incentivize companies to hire more students, few biotech players are tapping the new sources of funding.

Hiring managers also face a handful of external economic factors that make PEI less appealing to workers than it could be.

A lack of available housing and high prices are key issues, as is a generally increasing cost of living, representing a reversal from the affordability that was once a selling point for Atlantic Canada.

A lack of useable public transportation near Charlottetown’s Biocommons Research Park, where many of the province’s life sciences companies are headquartered, also represents a recruitment barrier, as do the limited dining options and amenities in the area. The report also describes prospective life sciences workers as having a “negative perception” of the quality and availability of healthcare in the region.

As solutions, the BioAlliance lays out a set of strategy goals that include increasing life sciences companies’ operational focus on human resources, improving opportunities for people from underrepresented groups and increasing outreach not just to university students, but to grade schoolers, their teachers and their parents.

“The talent gap will continue to increase so we must be proactive to ensure that youth and the public are aware of options,” says the report.

“We will promote CASTL’s pathways to bioscience careers and collaborations with all levels of educational institutions, with a focus on new-skilling.”

CASTL is the Canadian Alliance for Skills and Training in Life Sciences — a national, Charlottetown-based partnership between academia, industry and government of which the BioAlliance is a member, and which specializes in training workers for the biopharmaceutical manufacturing industry.