Supply Chain Market Intelligence – Job Market – Salary Fast Facts

Hello Argentus blog readers! Sam Manna, one of the Recruiting Industry’s leading Talent Specialists (specifically in SCM for  Manufacturing, Auto as well as Public Sector and Electronic and related industries). We are lucky to have him here at Argentus, and he’s  presenting up a storm with various Professional Supply Chain Organizations (APICS) and Educational Institutions and schools. He has given another presentation at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto about the job market and the emerging career prospects in Supply Chain Management. For his most recent presentation, he’s offered a number of interesting statistics and quick facts about the Supply Chain Job market in Canada particularly. We thought our network might have an interest in learning about some of this information too.

We’re always talking about how the Supply Chain sector is undergoing tremendous growth in Canada, so here’s some statistics about where the sector has been and where it’s going in the next few years. If you’re a senior Supply Chain professional, it’s entirely possible that you’ve heard some of these before, but if you haven’t, they’re pretty staggering when you take into account the direction of the wider economy over the past few years which let’s face it has been pretty soft.

1. According to the Canadian Supply Chain Sector Council (CSCSC), there are 767,000 active workers in the Supply Chain in Canada.

 This statistic includes everything from senior strategic professionals all the way to shop floor individuals and everything in between, but there’s a clear take away from this number: a very large volume of the Canadian workforce is engaged in getting products to market on time and on budget. It represents about 4% of the active workers in Canada. Pretty large for a sector that many people in the general public haven’t even heard of.  It’s time for people to get up and take a good hard look at SCM as a career option.

2. Approx. 150,000 of these positions are at the managerial or professional level. 

That represents about 19.5% of the wider supply chain job market. And the opportunities for Managers and Professionals in Supply Chain are only growing as the sector becomes more technologically sophisticated and gets more buy-in from the C-Suite and other business leaders.

3. According to the CSCSC, the Supply Chain sector in Canada added approximately 15,300 jobs every year between 2001-2010.

These represent newly created jobs, not newly vacant existing jobs. That’s a pretty hefty figure especially considering a number of those years were during a recession. It shows that even during an economic downturn, companies are looking to Supply Chain professionals to find efficiencies in their operations which in turn puts $$$ on the bottom line and money talks. Supply Chain professionals tend to pay for themselves in cost savings, so it’s no wonder companies kept hiring them during the recession.

4. The CSCSC estimates that there will be 80,000 newly vacant jobs in Supply Chain in Canada every year going forward. That’s a lot of NEW JOBS.

In addition to the robust job growth in the sector, this statistic illustrates something we’ve been talking about for a long time: many Supply Chain professionals are part of the Baby Boom wave and are moving towards retirement age, and that means the demand for new Supply Chain talent is going way up. What this statistic doesn’t show is that many of these jobs are becoming very much more strategic, more technology-dependent and more important to the overall efficiencies of companies.

Salary Statistics:

These come to us via the Supply Chain Management Association of Ontario.

The chart below shows the growth in Supply Chain salaries over the past five years, a time period in which compensation was somewhat stagnant in many (but not all) sectors of the economy.

You can see that growth in Supply Chain salaries was high across the board, but was especially robust in Alberta, where the energy sector has been truly booming, as the next chart helps illustrate:

This shows that the Natural Resources industry has been a booming industry in terms of Supply Chain salary growth. But you can see robust salary growth across a number of diverse industries during this period. The question of why Supply Chain has remained such a growth area in spite of a big recession and subsequent stagnation in the economy is an excellent area for future discussion, and we’d love it if some of our resident experts would chime in!

These charts and statistics are very general of course. They don’t break down salaries based on seniority or by specific function. They show the entire Supply Chain field and don’t breakdown average salaries for specific Procurement or Manufacturing or Logistics roles, for example. Market intelligence is something we look for in our very narrow recruitment vertical so whenever we are able to bring you more specific information we hope to provide you with some of these more granular salary numbers in the coming weeks, but hopefully these will give some statistical bite to our constant barking of how hot the sector is at the moment.

Over and out for now

Bronwen