CANADA SUFFERS FROM A DESPERATE AND GROWING SHORTAGE OF COMPUTERS DEVELOPERS AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERS BUT ESTIMATED 350000 CANADIAN COMPUTER AND SOFTWARE ENGINEERS ARE SETTLED IN SILICON VALLEY IN USA AND IT IS ESTIMATED THAT IN A DECADE THERE WILL BE 1.5 MILLION JOBS REMAINED UNFILLED July 10.2013 This summer, Facebook is cutting the ribbon on a brand new office in downtown Vancouver. The social media giant will employ some 150 staff, mainly recent software engineering grads from the area. According to the company, Vancouver was an ideal choice: close to Facebook offices in Seattle and Silicon Valley and attractive enough to pull in talented new recruits. For Vancouver tech boosters, this would seem validation: bricks-and-mortar proof that the city is on its way to becoming Silicon Valley North, a new hub of tech innovation north of the border. Unfortunately, the reality is quite nearly the opposite. Facebook’s new office has a one-year lifespan. It’s a pop-up boot camp for training local software engineers and then shipping them to the U.S. In fact, one year happens to be roughly the time required for a Canadian engineer to secure a permit for full-time work in the states. Rather than contributing to a homegrown tech scene, in other words, the new office will siphon off the already limited number of qualified professionals in the region. It’s less a success story than a reminder of a chronic problem. The Canadian brain drain Canada suffers from a desperate and growing shortage of computer developers and software engineers. Over the past several decades, Silicon Valley has claimed our best and brightest. An estimated 350,000 Canadians now live in the the Bay Area — a veritable lost generation lured by good, high-paying tech jobs and access to collaborators and capital. The consequences are plain to see and getting worse. Right now, only one in 10 organizations in Canada is able to meet critical IT needs in emerging areas like mobile, cloud computing, analytics and social media, according to a new IBM study. By 2016, we’ll be a full 100,000 tech workers short. The Information and Communications Technology Council, an independent policy advisor for the tech sector, has warned of “serious and pervasive” recruitment challenges in the years ahead. In reality, they’re already here. Over the last four years, I’ve grown HootSuite, a Vancouver-based social media company, from 20 to 300 employees. Finding qualified engineers and programmers has always been a challenge. It’s only getting harder. Right now, we have approximately 50 developer positions to fill by the end of the year. It takes us at least a month to find the right applicant for one of these posts. At that rate, we’ll still be interviewing candidates for job openings posted today in late 2017. Vancouver may be blessed with great vistas and mild weather, but developers are nowhere to be found. All of which makes growing a high-tech business in the city an exceedingly difficult proposition. The tech education crisis Yet, this doesn’t get at the root of the problem. Importing foreign engineers may offer a temporary fix, but it does little to nurture a homegrown and enduring tech scene. A lasting solution, by contrast, has to start in high schools, colleges and universities. Students need to be exposed to formal computer education early and to understand the kinds of fulfilling career opportunities that tech offers. Right now, that’s not happening in Canada. Instead, colleges and universities continue to train young people for jobs that simply aren’t in demand. Youth unemployment hovers at an abysmal 14%. Hundreds of thousands of recent university grads are unemployed or underemployed. In a recent year, a full two-thirds of education graduates in Ontario were unable to find full-time work. Meanwhile, Canadian companies are struggling to fill entry-level engineer and developer positions. In a climate of global recession, well paid tech jobs are sitting vacant. Something is deeply wrong with that picture. This training gap isn’t just a handicap for Canada’s tech industry. Without workers with the right skills, Canada as a whole can’t remain competitive. “It’s the largest threat to our economy,” says James Knight, president and CEO of the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, in a recent interview. Forecasts indicate that in a decade there will be a staggering 1.5 million jobs unfilled in Canada.
Posted on: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 08:28:37 +0000