Thanks.
Good afternoon, honourable members. Thank you for the opportunity to present to the committee today.
Mitacs is a national, independent, not-for-profit research organization that supports Canadian innovation through collaborative research projects that link Canadian businesses with leading experts at Canadian universities. A key component in all of our programs is skills training and professional development of our participants—graduate students and post-doctoral fellows at Canadian universities.
At the foundation, we understand that education is key to preparing our young people for jobs and that a strong foundational education is key to tackling chronic unemployment. At Mitacs we work with some of Canada's best educated young people, but even for these highly schooled youth we recognize that transitioning into high-quality jobs is a bigger challenge for this generation than it has ever been before. It is not just that these young people suffer these challenges, but in underutilizing their talent and training, we as Canadians lose the opportunity to be more productive and more innovative as a society. Over the last 15 years, we've developed programs that support skills development and training to ensure that we support the transition of these young researchers into productive, well-paying jobs.
Our flagship program, Mitacs Accelerate, is a program that integrates industrial research experience and professional skills development into the academic research training for graduate students and post-doctoral researchers through paid research internships aligned with their academic studies. Accelerate has grown from 18 internships in 2007 to well over 2,000 internships this year delivered from coast to coast in every sector and academic discipline.
Since 2007, Mitacs has supported internships for more than 5,000 Canadian students and post-docs. Our studies demonstrate that these students have an easier time transitioning to non-academic jobs, earn higher starting salaries than their peers, and even start their own companies at a higher rate. We've also observed an indirect benefit for young researchers through these internships. Host organizations clearly value the research performed by these interns. They have served as exceptional mechanisms to transfer knowledge and expertise from the universities into more than 2,000 Canadian companies, most of which are small and medium-sized enterprises. This value is best exemplified by the fact that companies often create new positions in their companies as a result of their participation in the program. Nearly 20% of our participating companies hire their interns into newly created positions within their firms. Not only are the interns benefiting personally from their improved employability but these internships have the potential to grow the pool of available jobs.
Mitacs has several other innovation programs, all built on the same general model of providing relevant experience and skills training as part of a comprehensive education. For instance, we have a post-doctoral training program called Elevate, which is now a national program thanks to funding in the most recent federal budget. Post-doctoral fellows are a wonderful, untapped resource of highly trained and educated young researchers, but many languish in university labs due to fewer opportunities to find jobs as university professors. Elevate provides these researchers the opportunity to work with industry and to gain skills and experience through a combination of mentorship, experience, and workshops all geared towards providing them with the ability to act as research managers for Canadian companies that lack capacity to build and manage research portfolios. This year, several hundred post-docs across the country will work as young research managers with Canadian companies, providing valuable research expertise to their company hosts while easing their transition out of the universities and into industry.
Finally, I'll mention our professional skills training program called Step. Mitacs runs a series of Step workshops at universities across the country on topics such as project management, communication skills, and business etiquette. These immensely popular workshops are offered free of charge to graduate students. In five years more than 10,000 students have attended Step workshops at universities in every province in Canada. These workshops supplement the students' advanced education with so-called soft skills that our industrial partners have identified as key hiring factors.
In all of these cases, we have engaged with industry partners—those who know best what skills and expertise they need in today's job market—to train our students. We believe a significant strength of our approach is that we do not seek to replace or to supplant the fine education provided by Canadian universities. Rather, we seek to supplement the quality education provided by our world-class institutions with the opportunity to apply knowledge first-hand to gain relevant experience and to connect with the professional world before facing the job market upon graduation.