Compensation Guide
Compensation is still the key motivator for employees to stay with an organization or choose one position over another. How competitive is your organization?
Implementing a robust compensation strategy strengthens your current operations and supports both the recruitment and retention of qualified workers. By providing HR solutions such as training and certification, you can reduce the skills gaps within your organization.
ECO Canada’s Compensation Guide 2021 edition includes data and responses from over 600 employers and workers and over 1,652 Canadian environmental jobs.
Price: $495 $199 CAD + Applicable Taxes
What’s in the Guide?
- Benchmarking data to ensure your organization maintains a competitive advantage
- HR insights and trends based on data from Canadian employers
- Compensation data by occupation, industry and specialization
- Regional salary data and geographic breakdowns
- Benefits offered: broken down by organization size, type and industry
Why Purchase this Guide?
By 2025, job growth and retirements will account for close to 173,000 net environmental job openings – equivalent to 25% of 2020 employment levels.
While other markets face long recoveries ahead, forecasts for environmental employment demand are positive with job openings anticipated to approach a quarter-million through 2029.
Investing in human capital is vital for the advancement of your business and the success of Canada’s green economy. Workforce attraction, retention and development strategies could help sustain an adequate supply of talent in the weeks, months and years to come!
Use our Compensation Guide to ensure that your organization measures up and is prepared to meet the challenges of the labour market with the right tools in place.
Take a look inside the 2021 Compensation Guide
ECO Canada’s Compensation Guide 2021 edition is a comprehensive handbook with salary benchmarking data to help build and nurture your team.
The guide contains detailed breakdowns across industries, occupations, and specializations as well as houses regional data for benchmarking compensation, no matter where you’re located.
With 130 pages of information, this resource also offers HR solutions and strategies to attract, recruit and retain Canadian environmental workers.
Get a sneak peek at the data to see how you can leverage this great tool.
Employers and environmental workers were surveyed in early 2021.
Employer Survey* – salaries and benefits for the top two environmental occupations in the organization and environmental human resource trends.
Worker Survey – respondent’s salary and benefits, along with characteristics of their employer organization.
*The survey was targeted at employers who identified their organization as environmental or recognized that they employ a relatively large number of environmental workers.
Workers were classified as environmental if they contributed to the protection, preservation or sustainability of the environment, were required to have environmental knowledge, skills or training, or were employed by environmental goods and services organizations.
A total of 626 participants completed the survey, including 197 employers and 1,223 environmental workers, representing 1,652 environmental jobs (or incidents) in full-time, part-time, contract, intern, student, and seasonal positions. Employers reported a total of 24,400 environmental employees within their organizations.
The number of participants that responded to each specific question varied. In some cases, multiple questions have been combined for the purpose of calculating percentiles.
Employers and workers were asked to provide salary ranges for the reported occupation(s). Employers provided this information for up to three levels of experience or tenure where applicable—for a maximum of six occupations per employer respondent.
The survey was conducted using mixed methods that combined online and telephone data collection. Both the online and telephone versions of the survey were administered in English and French. The survey was launched on February 8 and remained open until April 15, 2021.
Incidents have been presented as the combined number of reported jobs across surveys.
Due to the cross-sectoral nature of the environmental workforce, salary information is provided by:
- 9 occupational groups and sub-groups
- 7 regions
- 15 industries
- 14 specializations
- organization type and size
- experience level
The number of incidents for salary by category sections are based on the responses from the employer and worker surveys. Where possible, sample sizes have been provided, however, occupations, industries and specializations are not evenly distributed. To support benchmarking practices, median salaries have been reported rather than average salaries. When the sample size was too small to report, values have been removed from the salary tables.
- Technical specialists
- Scientists
- Engineers
- Technologists and technicians
- Architects and planners
- Operators and labourers
- Business, finance and administration workers
- Business, finance and administration officers
- Managers and supervisors
- British Columbia
- Alberta
- Saskatchewan and Manitoba
- Ontario
- Quebec
- Atlantic Canada
- Canadian Territories
- Professional, scientific and technical services
- Environmental consulting services
- Natural resources
- Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services
- Public administration
- Manufacturing
- Other services (except Public administration)
- Utilities
- Educational services
- Construction
- Wholesale trade & Retail trade
- Health care and social assistance
- Transportation and warehousing
- Finance and insurance & Real estate and rental and leasing
- Air quality protection
- Water quality protection
- Site assessment, remediation and reclamation
- Waste management
- Environmental health and safety
- Energy
- Natural resources management
- Fisheries and wildlife management
- Policy and legislation
- Sustainability
- Research and development
- Education and training
- Communications and public awareness
- Environmental management
ECO Canada will review individual requests on a case-by-case basis. Depending on the criteria outlined in the request, we will determine whether sufficient data are available.
ECO Canada can provide customized data for specific job titles, occupations and sub-sectors. Requests for these data will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis to determine whether sufficient incidents have been reported for these specific workforce segments.
The data was gathered from February to April 2021.
Yes, the participants are Canadian employers and environmental workers.
Surveys were conducted from February to April 2021. Economic theory and macroeconomic data indicate that wages do not decline until a downturn has been plaguing an economy for a considerable length of time (years). The idea is that wages are “sticky” – employees are not willing to take pay cuts until all their other options have been exhausted, and employers are hesitant to lower wages for fear that they will lose workers.
That said, incomes may fall for individuals employed on an hourly basis if their hours have been cut because of the economic shutdown. But more recent trends indicate that to whatever extent they have been impacted, the labour market has rebounded, and compensation has not been adversely affected.
The employment trends presented in the compensation guide are based on responses from the employer survey. Workforce insights are a part of ECO Canada’s labour market information studies that estimate the labour demand for Canada’s environmental workforce. ECO Canada releases labour outlook reports annually. To learn more about Canada’s environmental labour force, visit our Research Catalogue and download the latest reports.
ECO Canada offers certification and training programs and hosts career development opportunities including virtual events and workshops. Research is ongoing at the organization and reports are routinely published to provide timely, relevant and credible information and insights on Canada’s environmental workforce. Contact research@eco.ca for direct inquiries about labour market information and occupational standards.
Submit your thoughts to research@eco.ca to speak with a research coordinator.
ECO Canada endeavours to publish compensation guides annually. Data collection begins in February each year. If you wish to contribute salary information about your employment position or positions offered by your organization, please contact research@eco.ca to complete the survey.
No, refunds will not be issued. You can look at the Salary Report and HR Trends before you purchase.
ECO Canada is open to feedback and constantly evolving to meet the needs of our audience. Please provide your comments to research@eco.ca to strengthen future research and support of environmental employment across Canada.
