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Canada has too much geography and not enough history, Canada's 13th Prime Minister, John Diefenbaker once said.
The vast geography makes life difficult for companies looking to lure brilliant IT talent and job seekers hunting for greener IT pastures. Both are often hampered by a lack of specifics about the IT job market. Calgary may be clamouring for IT staff with energy expertise while Montréal may be desperate for gaming professionals.
And there is, arguably, too much history in this arena, as national job indexes typically focus on past trends rather than on forecasting upcoming changes in supply and demand.
This state of affairs is set to change shortly.
The Canadian Advanced Technology Alliance (CATA Alliance), an Ottawa-based technology advocacy group, recently partnered with Monster Canada, a Montréal-based national online job board, to provide its members with Monster's newly-created national micro-employment index for the technology sector.
"We are facing an IT labour shortage today, and this trend will likely continue over the next ten years," says Louis Gagnon, vice-president of marketing at Monster Canada.
Job-seekers will have more power than ever before, he says, so employers will need to modify their strategies for attracting and compensating the right IT talent. "It is crucial to understand which tech sector is hottest, in which city, for what companies," says Gagnon.
Companies competing for scarce, high-demand skills in one city may need to cast their nets wider – or be prepared to pay top dollar in their local markets. "If the Toronto market is growing at a 25 per cent clip yearly, but Montréal only 5 per cent, then maybe employers should recruit there. And vice-versa for job seekers," says Gagnon.
Monster expects to launch the new national index by mid-2006, he says. Monster's crew is busy crunching data scoured from 268,000 job postings culled from online job boards such as Workopolis, CareerBuilder and other sites to create a baseline. "Once it's established, we can measure variances in the future, and break it out by occupation, province, city and so on."
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