Self-Employment Staffs the Vancouver Film Industry

One of the major advantages that EMSI’s labour market data offers is the ability to cross-reference industry and occupation data. With the staffing patterns and inverse staffing patterns tools, Analyst can provide not only a big picture of jobs in a regional economy but also tell a story about how the growth of specific industries creates opportunities for people in a wide range of occupations.

For a good example of how useful it can be to look at the staffing patterns of a growing industry, let’s take the example of the ever-expanding Vancouver movie industry. Statistics Canada recently published a comprehensive study of Canadian film, television and video production which showed that movie and tv production were adding billions of dollars annually to the Canadian economy, and growing by over 12% a year. This only confirms that, with its reputation as Hollywood North established by its willingness to stand in on screen for practically every city in the world, Vancouver is one of the most important areas for film production in Canada. In fact, comparing jobs in the motion picture and sound recording industry across all of Canada’s Census Divisions, Vancouver has more jobs than anywhere except Montreal and Toronto – and as this chart makes obvious, it was the only area of Canada to see jobs in the film industry grow over the last six years.

When we think of filmmaking, we think of actors, directors, cameramen, and maybe a few other occupations. To get a real picture of what kind of jobs the booming Vancouver film industry is making available to workers, we need to use Analyst’s staffing patterns. Here are the top 10 occupations in the Vancouver film industry, including both employees and self-employed:

Despite movie-making’s reputation for glitz and glamour, none of the occupations seem to offer jobs that are earning notably high wages. This tips us off to an important aspect of industry staffing reports – self-employment. Because of the methodology Statistics Canada uses to gather wage data, self-employed workers’ wages are not available. As a result, average wage figures for occupations with large amounts of self-employment tend to be dramatically low; notice the strange $2.95 an hour which camera operators appear to be making.

Numbers like this mean that to get a better idea of working conditions in these occupations, we should isolate the Employees dataset, which will give us accurate wage data. Here are those same 10 occupations, accounting only for employees. Notice how much higher the average wages are — $25.35 for film and camera operators, not $2.95 — now that we’ve removed self-employment from the picture:

To make the relationship between these two sets of numbers clearer, we stacked employees up against self-employed, to get a sense of how the two relate. This chart shows the number of employed and self-employed in each occupation classification, and gives a sense of the percentage breakdown within each:

Those are some significant differentials. The Vancouver film industry is clearly dependent on the role of entrepreneurs, contract workers, and independent artists. Especially interesting is the huge number of self-employed computer programmers in the film industry.

It’s also instructive to note that the money isn’t only in film-specific occupations. There’s also excellent money to be made by graphic designers who work with moviemakers (median wage of $24.04 ) and especially those same computer programmers ($31.25 among employees, and a healthy 7.5% growth rate). Overall, the staffing analysis revealed 17 occupations with more than a 100 jobs in the film industry, and 29 with more than 50 jobs.

Clearly there are a broad range of occupations that can take advantage of the burgeoning Hollywood North economy, not just those commonly associated with filmmaking.