How Many Canadian Marine Technicians Are Poised to Retire?

In the December 15th edition of Boating Industry Canada’s Newsweek, the experts at the OMOA predicted that about 1 in every 5 marine technicians across Canada was getting ready to retire. That level of talent loss should be a major concern to our industry now.

Last week, we invited Newsweek readers who employ marine technicians, to complete a simple, anonymous survey that could help us nail down a more statistically valid number.

From 9:00am Tuesday to 9:00 am Friday, 47 people visited the online survey address and 36 people completed the survey. We asked that only one survey be completed for each business.

The first question was; Does your business employ marine technicians? Of the 36 respondents, 100% employed marine technicians.

Question two asked; How many full time technicians do you employ? Of 35 respondents, 100% employed full time (so 1 marina in 36 had only part time technicians) and those 35 respondents employed a total of 125 technicians. That is an average of 3.57 technicians per business however, two respondents must have had very large or multi-location businesses and one employed 10 technicians while the other employed 24.

If we take those anomaly businesses out of the mix, the average respondent employed 2.75 technicians – that is 33 businesses employed 91 techs.

Question three asked; How many part time technicians?  Here, only 31 responded and 61% did not use part time. There were only 13 part time technicians for 31 businesses.

Question 4 was; How many of your technicians do you expect to retire in the next 5 years? The 35 respondents stated that 31 out of the total of 125 technicians are expected to retire within 5 years.

The OMOA predicted that 1 in 5 marine technicians were to retire soon and in fact, our survey is closer to 1 in 4, actually 24.8%.

Perhaps more significantly, the final question asked; How many do you expect to retire within 12 months and the respondents stated that 4.8% were going to retire this year.

Do you have an action plan to address your tech status to deliver quality service in the future?