Valerie McTavish

Retention may be the name of the game in Metro Vancouver, but elsewhere in the province it’s all about recruitment. In smaller cities like Kelowna and Prince George, jobs sit open for months, forcing businesses to take their search across the country and around the world. It takes a lot...

Executive education is not about learning facts and theory; it’s about the spaces around the learning. That means developing innovation-enabling processes, relationship building, cross-sector exchanges and cultivating creative intelligence. “Universities aren’t just there to download their knowledge,” explains Kate Dilworth, adjunct professor and director of learning design at SFU’s Beedie...

Judging a workplace based on the calibre and frequency of its staff lunches, the decor of its lounge areas or its liberal policy with video-game time is a bit like picking a college based on the ferocity of frosh week. When the hangover clears, you’ve got real life to deal...

It’s not an uncommon entrepreneurial story: buoyed by the excitement and opportunity, the new business owner cleans out her savings to get her venture off the ground. A few years down the road, it’s her RRSP savings that are cashed in to help the business through a rough patch or...

When Walt Disney Co. bought Kelowna-based Club Penguin, an online gaming company, in 2007 for $350 million, its three founders planned their departures but not their retirement, and with Lane Merrifield’s exit in December last year, all of the original penguins have now flown the coop. In December 2009, Dave Krysko...

Staff retention means looking to the future.  Competitive salary, good benefits and a friendly office environment were once the pillars of keeping talent happy and in place. Then came the social committees with big budgets to burn, stocked kitchens, flexible hours, liberal Facebook policies and playrooms set aside for spontaneous inter-office Wii tournaments.

It’s not who you know; it’s who you ‘like.’ The old maxim, “it’s not what you know but who you know,” may be truer now than ever when it comes to recruiting top talent in B.C. Luckily, thanks to social media, everybody seems to “know” more people than ever.

A healthy company culture starts with open communication.  Brian Scudamore is the CEO of WOW 1Day! Painting Inc. and he doesn’t have an office. It’s not that the young painting franchise company doesn’t have the space, but being office-less means he has an opportunity to drop in and chat up anyone, in any department, at any time.

The ideal job candidate is probably already working for you, so it pays for companies big and small to develop talent within. A full-colour projected image of Mickey Mouse is the first thing a visitor sees when stepping off the elevator at the offices of Disney Interactive Studios in Kelowna before being greeted by receptionist Shannon Sawatzky – whose official title is facilities services coordinator. She has held the job for a few months now but this wasn’t her first position...

Our top five companies give credence to the "work hard, play hard" cliché in the tech industry. Keep them challenged. Keep them entertained. Keep them smitten. Maintaining the interest of the primarily gen-Y workforce that powers the tech industry is like keeping a kitten glued to a game of string-ball. If they aren’t constantly engaged, they’ll lose interest and move on to the next shiny thing. 


Young and restless: that’s one way to describe the staff that fuel companies in the professional services and communications sector. At Benefits by Design Inc. (BBD), a custom benefit program administrator, for example, the median age of employees is 33.

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inding good people isn’t a challenge for financial services companies among this year’s Best Companies to Work For in B.C. “I don’t have to put ads in the paper very often,” says Herlinda Mills, manager of HR and marketing for...