Good morning, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen of the committee.
My name is Paul Swinwood, and I am president of the Software Human Resource Council. I would like to thank you for the opportunity to share in this examination of employability issues.
The Software Human Resource Council is a not-for-profit council, one of 33. We work with industry, education, associations, and governments—and I'll put an “s” on “governments”—both federal and provincial, to address employment issues affecting the IT sector. Our goal is to ensure that Canada has an adequate supply of IT workers to compete in today's interesting global economy.
The council, over the last 12 years, has done a lot to lead us to believe that in order to succeed, our nation must focus on its current high-wage economy—and I have some numbers I'll follow through on—and especially in the IT sector. The current IT sector is responsible for 600,000 jobs in the Canadian economy, $137 billion in revenue, and billions more in exports and capital expenditures.
Also, the IT sector is very fast-paced. For those of you who have been following it, we change the technologies about once every two years. It's an interesting place to have been for the last 40 years.
IT is prominent in every sector. We enable the successes for each and every other industry, and clearly, the IT sector has a major impact on the Canadian economy as a whole and what drives our economy.
As concerns the workers, the IT workforce, the professionals, so far in 2006 the unemployment rate in Canada's IT sector has been hovering between 2% and 2.5%. This compares to the 6% unemployment rate nationally for all sectors. This has made for a very tight labour market, and nine of the provinces and territories have identified the IT sector and computer professionals as sectors with skill shortages.
To compound this problem, there has been a 70% decrease in enrolment in computer science programs over the past five years. The additional concern surrounding this is that 50% of the IT workforce is made up of university graduates, and another 27% are college or CEGEP graduates. Also, a combination of new technologies, offshoring, and outsourcing has and will change the face of IT over the near future. This, combined with our impending baby-boomer exodus, is equalling major problems for our sectors as we go forward.
So what are the key labour market issues for our sector? The first surrounds competencies. Employers are looking for professionals who not only can do the technical work, but more importantly, can become part of the solution and add value for their business. They are looking for people who can meet with customers, market and present ideas, and communicate with colleagues and work in teams. It sounds simple.
There is a significant lack of employees in our field with what we call “the package”. The package is made up of the IT skills, the business management that I mentioned earlier, and interpersonal skills. Employees with all these skills are in short supply, and in fact, workers with these skills enjoy a premium compensation. I just met with a company yesterday that was talking about a 10% compensation benefit for people with those skills, in order to attract them.
One of our goals moving forward is to find a way to ensure there's a constant stream of employees with the package entering our workforce through the educational system, the career changers, and by utilizing internationally educated professionals.
The Software Human Resource Council has devised an occupational skills profile model related to the NOC codes to define the occupations in our sector. We currently have 27 different occupations that we track, and another nine are in development.
We believe that in order to begin addressing the need for employees with the package, the OSPM is being expanded to include interpersonal skills and business skills, as well as the new and emerging technologies. The major effort that we're looking at is in retraining managers. Strong management is a major retention strategy for most IT companies.
The second issue we've identified involves education, training, and learning. IT workers are highly educated. More than half of them have university degrees, and many have PhDs. It's a highly qualified and educated workforce. The technical training these professionals have is on par with anywhere in the world. Our university and college systems provide world-class technical training. In addition, industry averages 10 days of training--that's formal training--per year, per worker, for each of these 600,000 workers. This proves that both industry and the workforce are investing in the future of the IT sector. However, there's still room for improvement.
In both continuing education and in post-secondary institutions, there are challenges. Employers, the market, industry, need workers not only with technical skills but with interpersonal and business skills. Too many of our post-secondary schools still offer adequate or advanced technical training, but nowhere do they give business strategy, marketing, and general liberal arts mixed in with the technology. However, there is real demand for such rounded workers.
Through research, SHRC has identified and sees value in the increase of workers with the package, and we are working with the educational institutions to revise their curricula to better reflect the broad needs of industry and incorporate the soft skills and business skills into the curriculum. SHRC also endorses the need for vertical integration of competencies through the educational continuum.
The third issue we're working on, secondary and post-secondary enrolments, I will skip through fairly quickly since I've been given one minute to take on this. If Canada is to be globally competitive, we need to have more people enrolled in our post-secondary education.
The final issue is career mobility, diversity, and equity. Twenty-seven percent of our workforce is female; 10% of the workforce are visible minorities; 1% are aboriginal. That 1% translates to about 6,000 aboriginals, of which 5,500 will have a post-secondary degree. We have some interesting challenges as we go forward.
With that, I'd like to conclude. The information we have presented represents some of the challenges we're facing within the IT sector. We are in a global economy and a global race for being competitive. We need people who are highly educated, well trained, and well skilled.
Thank you.