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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."
Gagnon explains the difference between Statistics Canada's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) index and Monster's. "They do the past and we do the future," he says. "The two indices are complementary."
The ICT index's data is derived by surveying large numbers of employers about jobs created in the last month, so it reflects past trends. Monster's is based on actual counts and data derived from jobs posted online, and reflects future hires to be made in the next 30-60 days, says Gagnon.
CATA is working with Monster to help the Canadian high-tech sector find and retain the right people. "Intellectual capital is everything," says John Reid, president of CATA Alliance, explaining the impetus for partnering with Monster. "We're going to increase the work we do in better understanding the attraction and retention of skilled talent, since we're moving into labour shortages. Companies that rely on talent to create innovation will need to come up with solid HR plans."
The moribund high-tech sector is coming back to vigorous life, according to Reid. A recent CATA survey reveals that 90 per cent of companies in the sector are looking for new talent. The venture capital tap is starting to flow, and start-up business plans are based on real customer needs instead of hype now that the hard lessons of the tech bubble have been learned. "So we have a perfect wave to push up growth in the high-tech sector," says Reid.
Many companies are already looking beyond local markets to other provinces and countries for talent, he says. "The trend is more outward-looking to fill gaps."
But 80 per cent of these companies don't have metrics to measure the ROI of their human capital or best practices in place to retain their people, according to the survey.
"With Monster being a global company, we're interested in best practices companies can use for this," says Reid. "We want to bring global compensation tools to our members. It's not enough to look at Canada only – we must look at the big picture world."
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