Veterans Affairs committee  No.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's right.

Veterans Affairs committee  We have full access to all of the data that we need to be able to do all the assessments, everything from what we call MOSs, military occupational specialties, down to specific training and what training is involved, what the curricula are. We had to build all that in to build the competency to ensure that when we said you had the skill, you in fact did.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, sir. This is a private company.

Veterans Affairs committee  We've actually had this tool employed across the entire veterans administration at one point, so there are major organizations that have taken this on as well as something they thought was really viable.

Veterans Affairs committee  The hiring of veterans inside that space is a little different model, so it didn't quite work as well.

Veterans Affairs committee  It's Canadian dollars, yes, sir.

Veterans Affairs committee  There were a couple of issues. One, you have to maintain an engineering staff to constantly update and make certain that when working with industry.... In particular here, if the design is such that it's going to be employed across government and the private sector, the unique nature of all of those relationships has to be worked on a customer basis, so there's quite a bit of back and forth on that.

Veterans Affairs committee  Again, it wouldn't be on a cost per use. In other words, the individual using it doesn't cost money. It's really about the size of the scale here in terms of jobs in the marketplace. They all have to be coded against the scale, and all of the jobs inside the military have to be coded, to make sure those linkages remain fresh and valuable throughout the life of the program.

Veterans Affairs committee  One thing we've done with our system is that we get to the middle ground, so education, training, whether it's a skills training area like certification to be a welder, all the way to a university setting, or the linkages to what jobs you might want to take. For instance, if your goal is to be X and to bridge that gap requires perhaps a couple of years of working in a certain area, that helps to identify that as well.

Veterans Affairs committee  That's correct.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, no, that's alright. Another day.

Veterans Affairs committee  Those are the major employers that have set national goals of hiring, say, 100, or 200, or 1,000 veterans. They needed this tool, so they made that investment in their own company's website.

Veterans Affairs committee  I completely agree. This tool will allow you to get some of the answer. Part of the real solution is working on the other side, with the employer. The employer has to be educated, and there are groups out there that are spending their resources to help human resource departments be trained to understand those inherent skills that a military person brings and also to understand what their needs are, so that when they bring them into the company they can assimilate them in a way that fits the way a military person thinks about organizational dynamics and can retain that military person.

Veterans Affairs committee  No, we're fortunate that we have a number of employers who have specifically said they want to hire veterans and need our help to hire them, who like our tool and will use our tool on their own site and will train their people to be sensitive to this transition. It has become much more of a role played by industry to self-educate, and we have given them the resources and the tools to make those linkages with the military skills translator.