Project Northstar
What is Project Northstar?
Project NORTHSTAR is a labour market planning initiative grounded in Newfoundland and Labrador’s seafood processing and aquaculture production/processing workforce, including bioprocessing and manufacturing functions that occur within or directly support those facilities.
Employers in seafood and aquaculture processing face acute shortages in technical, utilities, supervisory, and quality functions that are prerequisites for reliable, compliant, year-round operations. These shortages are intensified in rural regions, where recruitment and retention are constrained by non-wage factors such as
housing availability
childcare access
healthcare access
transportation
spousal employment opportunities,
settlement supports.
In parallel, workforce planning is weakened by fragmentation in role definitions and inconsistent competency expectations across employers and regions. Similar jobs are described with different titles and implied qualifications, slowing recruitment, complicating curriculum alignment, and making it difficult to interpret labour demand signals consistently through current standardized classification systems.
NORTHSTAR will address these barriers by producing a focused, sector-owned planning package that standardizes priority roles, reconciles labour market intelligence, translates validated competencies into provider-neutral curriculum planning tools, and equips priority rural hubs with readiness diagnostics and playbooks producing 12 validated role profiles mapped to NOC 2021, reflecting the occupational families most directly tied to plant operations, maintenance/utilities, quality systems, and front-line supervision.
Atlantic BioCorp will act as convenor and project administrator, with delivery governed through a multi-partner Steering Committee and OVALA as well as engagement with the five Indigenous Governments and Organizations (IGOs) in Newfoundland and Labrador via various levels of involvement up to and including membership on the Steering Committee.
The Project Objectives
Project objectives and core outputs are as follows:
Standardize priority occupations and competency expectations for the target sector by producing 12 validated, NOC 2021-mapped role profiles and a Workforce Strategy (2025–2030).
Produce a reconciled, transparent labour market intelligence package for those occupations in the target sector, including an LMI Brief, an open, privacy-safe dataset with a data dictionary, and an update methodology.
Translate validated roles into adoption-ready curriculum planning tools (module blueprints and instructor guide templates), designed to be provider-neutral and validated with public post-secondary partners and relevant private training providers.
Diagnose rural hub readiness constraints that impede recruitment and retention by producing readiness assessments and playbooks for two priority hubs, including actionable pathways and partnership templates.
Provide employer-facing HR strategic planning tools to support adoption (job description templates, competency matrices, onboarding and retention tools) and a practical adoption pathway plan.
Northstar’s End Goal
Within 18 months, the seafood processing and aquaculture production/processing sector in Newfoundland and Labrador will have a complete, open-licensed planning package: standardized role profiles aligned to NOC 2021, a reconciled LMI brief and dataset with update guidance, provider-neutral curriculum blueprints validated across the training ecosystem, rural hub readiness playbooks, and an employer HR toolkit and adoption pathway.
These outputs are designed to be neutral, publicly accessible, and reusable, enabling employers (including rural operators without dedicated HR capacity), educators, IGOs, communities, and policymakers to work from the same definitions, evidence, and implementation-ready tools, and to update them over time without restarting from scratch.
Further information and releases regarding Project Northstar with be located online at
OVALA.ca
