A coalition of Canadian businesses plans to take a more grass-roots approach to spearheading the country’s IT skills shortage by intercepting students well before they even reach their post-secondary years.
“The root of the problem is at the secondary and even primary level,” said Stéphane Boisvert, president of Bell Canada’s enterprise group and spokesperson for The Coalition for Tomorrow’s ICT Skills.
Attracting interest among young students in what Boisvert called STEM areas – science, technology, engineering and mathematics – is a problem that eventually manifests itself in universities and colleges.
Boisvert spoke at The Empire Club of Canada in Toronto about the IT talent gap and the Coalition’s initiatives to address that problem. Other Coalition members include CGI, Bank of Montreal, Rogers Communications, Nortel Networks and IBM Canada.
There are several reasons for the country’s talent gap, said Boisvert, including the aging population and lack of women and skilled immigrants entering the IT field. But also, the technology bust of 2000 and companies increasingly offshoring their IT operations “have had a negative psychological impact on IT career choices.”
Closing the IT talent gap is crucial, he said, because IT systems and IT work are integrated into almost every facet of economic life. There are currently 605,000 IT professionals in the country, but according to a study by the Conference Board of Canada, there will be a demand for 89,000 IT positions within the next three to five years. The Board estimates that each unfilled job has an average economic impact of $120,000.
That hurts the country’s national productivity race, said Boisvert, adding that a single percent improvement in productivity performance will reap a standard of living increase of $14,000.
Therefore, the Coalition’s goals are to raise the profile of IT and IT career choices among young people, generate public awareness of the importance of IT to Canada, and encourage government immigration policies that respond to current and future needs of the Canadian enterprise.
To reach these goals, the Coalition plans to launch several initiatives including a Lab Sharing Program whereby Coalition members will offer facilities and resources to IT students in high school and university by opening their corporate labs on weeknights and weekends – an initiative Boisvert likened to “a bank opening up its vault”.
Coalition members will also allow students to use their research and development and high-tech facilities to get a glimpse of IT’s role in today’s economy.
Other initiatives include interviews and surveys with 1,000 grade nine and 10 students on their perspectives of IT careers. The Coalition will also promote IT careers through media relations campaigns, Internet-intensive projects, television and radio broadcasts, and Webcasts.
In an interview with ComputerWorld Canada, Terry Power, president and chief operating officer with Toronto-based IT staffing firm Sapphire Technologies, said the Coalition’s grass-roots approach is important because high school students very often find themselves ineligible to enrol in certain post-secondary programs because they have already dropped science and math from their curriculum.
But another part of the challenge, said Power, is that school counsellors are so bogged down with social issues like teen pregnancy, bullying and drugs, that they don’t have the opportunity to learn about the possible IT careers for students. Furthermore, they themselves often lack the science and math background and are “equally unaware of the careers that are out there in terms of IT.”
The Coalition is battling a negative perception of IT careers, said Power, given the “hangover” from the dot.com era, which was at the time made worse by the belief that even more jobs would be lost to offshoring.
And the geek image of the IT professional isn’t helping either. The irony is that the most sought-out skill among Sapphire’s customers, said Power, is an ability to interact with the business. “We need people that are capable of marrying the technology to the business and using technology to drive the business.”
