Practical guides for people considering camp and fly-in/fly-out work.
A day in the life at a remote work camp
Remote work camps run on a simple premise: everything you need — bed, meals, laundry, gym — is within a five-minute walk, because the nearest town might be three hundred kilometres away. A typical day starts with breakfast in the dining hall before the morning safety meeting, where the whole crew hears the day's plan, any hazards on site and who is doing what.
The work itself is usually a twelve-hour shift, and in summer that can mean daylight almost the whole way through. After shift, most people head straight to the dry for a shower and hot meal, then unwind however they like — gym, TV room, a call home on the camp Wi-Fi. Quiet hours are taken seriously, because everyone is on the same rotation and nobody wants a rough night's sleep before another twelve hours.
The adjustment is real for the first week or two. Most experienced camp workers will tell you the same things help: pack light but include good earplugs and warm boots, stay on the camp schedule even on days off, and treat the dining hall like your kitchen — the cooking is better than its reputation, and the coffee is usually excellent.
Resume tips for camp and trades jobs
Camp and FIFO hiring moves fast — recruiters often screen a resume in under a minute — so the goal is to make your tickets, tickets and tickets impossible to miss. List your certifications in a dedicated section at the top: Red Seal or trade certificates, first aid, H2S Alive, CSTS and site-specific training. If a posting asks for a ticket you hold, it should appear verbatim from the job ad.
Numbers do the heavy lifting in the experience section. “Operated 793 haul trucks” is weaker than “operated CAT 793F haul trucks on a 12-hour night rotation for 14 months with zero recordables.” Rosters matter too: hiring managers want to know you have actually worked 14/7 or 21/7 rotations and understand what that means for reliability and fatigue management.
Finally, address the remote part head-on. If you have worked fly-in, winter road or remote sites before, say so explicitly. If you have not, show you are set up for it: a valid driver's licence, no scheduling conflicts with the rotation, and a clear statement that you understand the camp rules that come with the pay.
How FIFO rosters work
A roster is the in-and-out cycle of a camp job, written as days on site followed by days off — 14/7 means fourteen days at camp followed by seven days at home. The most common rotations in Canadian mining and camp services are 14/7 and 21/7, with 20/10 common in construction and drilling. Each has a trade-off: longer swings mean fewer flights and bigger blocks of home time, but longer stretches away.
Pay on rostered work is usually structured as an annual salary paid evenly, or as an hourly rate with overtime after a set number of hours in the rotation. Travel days matter too: many employers pay for travel time and cover charter flights, which is worth real money on a fly-in job and should be confirmed in writing before you accept an offer.
Before committing to a roster, work through the honest math with the people it affects. Two weeks in camp can mean missing two weekends of kids' hockey; three-week swings are harder on relationships but can mean nearly half the year at home. The people who last in FIFO are the ones whose households genuinely run well on the schedule they signed up for.
Travel arrangements: who pays for what
One of the biggest differences between camp jobs is how travel is covered, and it is worth more than most people think. A fly-in position that charters you from Edmonton to site can be worth $5,000–$10,000 a year in flights alone compared to a drive-in camp, before you count travel days paid at your regular rate. Employers variously cover charter flights, commercial flights to a regional hub, bus or shuttle transport, mileage, or nothing at all — and the posting may not say. Ask before you sign: who books the travel, is it paid time, and what happens if a flight is cancelled or you miss a rotation.
On site, the usual package is a private room in camp, three meals a day in the dining hall, and laundry — but 'usual' is not 'universal'. Some construction camps charge a small daily camp fee deducted from your pay, which is legal when disclosed and worth factoring into rate comparisons. LOA (living out allowance) is the alternative model: instead of camp, you receive a daily allowance and arrange your own room and board in town — common near communities like Fort McMurray, Thompson or Flin Flon where beds exist.
The tax picture is also different on the road. Employer-paid travel to a remote worksite is generally not a taxable benefit in Canada, and northern residents may qualify for additional federal deductions and benefits. Keep your boarding passes and travel records — if an employer reimburses travel, those receipts are your proof if the CRA ever asks.
The entry-level pathway into camp work
You do not need a trade ticket to start working rotations. The most realistic doors in are camp services — kitchen helpers, dishwashers, housekeepers and camp attendants — plus general labourer roles on construction and drilling crews. These jobs often require little more than a clean pre-employment medical, a willingness to work the rotation, and sometimes an easy-to-get ticket like Food Safe Level 1 or Standard First Aid. Pay runs roughly $45,000–$65,000 a year to start, with room and board covered on site, which is how people save aggressively in their first years.
From there, the pathway usually runs in one of two directions. In camp services, experienced staff move into lead cook, camp manager or maintenance roles. On the operations side, labourers and helpers get hired into operator seats — haul truck, excavator, crusher — or into apprenticeships. Driller helper to driller is a well-worn route, and most drilling contractors will say so openly: they would rather train a reliable helper than poach a driller. If you want the trades path, register as an apprentice with your provincial authority early; camp wages make it much easier to survive the lower-paid apprenticeship years.
Two things accelerate everything: tickets and reliability. The first is easy — H2S Alive, CSTS, Standard First Aid and a Class 5 licence with a clean abstract are cheap, fast, and appear in half the postings on this board. The second is the whole game in a camp environment. Showing up on time for fourteen straight days, every rotation, is what gets you the operator seat, the apprenticeship sponsorship, and the supervisor role — camp work rewards consistency more than almost any other industry.
