Human Resources Committee on April 23rd, 2012

[Morgan Elliott]

Sure. It's an investment in people's futures. In Ontario, the program is $3,000 per credit for co-op. We pay a fairly substantial salary of anywhere between $45,000 and $60,000 for a co-op student, which is a heck of a lot better than I made when I graduated from school. So the government is recouping its money.

[Karna Gupta]

I have the same comment. When I speak to the industry, to RIM and others, the input is that they all would like to see some sort of a program delivered whereby they can go out, get students in, and get some credit for bringing them in, either for the summer term or for two terms, and then sending them back to school.

[David Ticoll]

Yes, I strongly agree with this. There are other things we could do as well around sharing best practices and creating an infrastructure for sharing best practices in various kinds of experiential learning, including co-op, but also others. The second would be to help post-secondary institutions with creating their infrastructures to support the co-op experience, because academically there are a lot of national leaders doing this. I don't think this needs to cost money so much as to just provide a vehicle for the sharing of knowledge. Greasing the wheels in those kinds of ways would also help a lot.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Yes.

The other thing you've spoken about are the LMOs. Where it gets bogged down is that there's an absence of a vernacular, really, I guess. You were saying that it has to be more granular for it to be more effective. But is there any kind of movement afoot now within the industry to bring that stuff together?

[David Ticoll]

If you're talking about the labour market information, labour market research—

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Yes, exactly.

[David Ticoll]

Well, the government really needs to make the first move on this—

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Okay.

[David Ticoll]

—because industry, the standards.... First of all, the core data comes out of the census and comes out of StatsCan monthly, quarterly, and in annual reports and so on. It drives a lot of government-funded research, which is the most commonly available research, and again, is the work that happens most frequently.

By the way, those same extremely narrow national occupational classifications also tend to be replicated in a lot of other research. There was a study done in Toronto by the Toronto Region Research Alliance on the Toronto labour market. They felt they had to use those classifications because they are the standard.

Even though that wasn't federally funded, it is the standard. So we need to tackle that problem at the national level, because it in fact goes back not just to StatsCan, but also to international standards for these things.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

You see governments playing a lead role there...?

[David Ticoll]

Well, lead or facilitating, what have you, but it needs to issue a signal that we want to address this problem.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Okay.

Morgan, it was in 2003 or 2004 that you guys announced your expansion and the establishment of the facility in Nova Scotia. Could you give me an overview of that?

I would think that part of the impetus would be trying to establish places close to the rich number of post-secondary institutions within that community. How are you doing with recruiting talent from those institutions? What types of lines in do you have there or what types of working relationships do you have with those institutions? Could you give me an overview of that initiative?

[Morgan Elliott]

Sure. Our facility in Bedford, just outside of Halifax, has been an overwhelming success, and not only because of the research institutions like Saint Mary's and Dalhousie and others in the area. We find that retention rates are excellent in Nova Scotia. In fact, they're far below some of the industry norms....

As for the type of staff we've been hiring, they're definitely in the customer support organization area. They're supporting our clients on Wall Street, including some of the big banks and some of the big government institutions as well.

It has been a combination of the low turnover and high retention rates and the fact that we can get access to that skilled talent. Access to talent was one of the reasons why we located in Nova Scotia. It's the only reason we located there.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

And there's been very limited imported talent out of that facility, or...?

[Morgan Elliott]

Yes. All the talent has been from Nova Scotia, from the Maritimes, from New Brunswick and other areas.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Great.

Going back to Joe's question on the course that you guys have put together, you've seen some success in that. That makes absolute sense, training people for...and you would hope that it would be flexible enough and nimble enough to....

What types of opportunities are there? Do you go back and review that annually? Is it the same program, or is it driven more, as Joe had indicated, on the principles of learning and that type of stuff, or is it specific stuff? In your sector it's all just so rapidly changing. What's new this month is redundant six months down the road.

How do you stay current with the curriculum?

[David Ticoll]

We're very deliberate about that.

We designed this course—to use educational learning lingo—with a set of learning outcomes. These are basically the things a graduate of this program should know after they've completed the program, the minimum set of things they need to know. If you take the BTM, the business technology program, anywhere in Canada, you can be sure that you'll get those things.

But that's only part of the overall undergraduate curriculum. That's just the learning outcomes. We're not prescribing the structure of the courses or how the courses get taught. In fact, we're encouraging the different universities to offer different versions of it, to specialize in one thing or another. One university might specialize in entrepreneurship. Another one might specialize in deep programming. Another one might specialize in business operations, management design, or a very specific area such as retail.

We're encouraging that innovation in the programs within the context of an overall set of core assumptions of what the program's about.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

So in the jobs that are forthcoming, in the jobs that we're going to be looking at filling in the future, what percentage of those would be Canadian graduates as opposed to...? Obviously for a number of them you're looking for foreign talent, but do you have any kind of indication as to what the percentage would be?

[David Ticoll]

That's a good question. That's another good topic for this revised labour market information research that we need.

[Morgan Elliott]

I can tell you, just from the Waterloo example, that the answer would be less than 100%. We have Microsoft. Google has set up shop. We have a number of U.S. firms that are stealing the talent away and moving them right to Silicon Valley upon graduation.

[Karna Gupta]

As well, 40% of our graduating class is not indigenous to Canada. They're foreign students. Current policy has seen a lot of them in fact go back after. The issue is how to create a model where a lot of them will stay here for four or five years, work, and contribute towards the economy.

[David Ticoll]

Yes, there are two parts here: the policies don't encourage them to stay here, and also it's more attractive to go home than it might have been 15 years ago.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Just as far as remuneration, or...?

[David Ticoll]

Everything.

[Rodger Cuzner, Liberal, Cape Breton—Canso, NS]

Everything, yes.

How are we doing for time?