Human Resources Committee on April 23rd, 2012

[David Ticoll]

Thank you, Mr. Daniel.

Actually, I was just recently involved in a survey of a number of major ICT employers in Canada, large and small. Everything that Mr. Elliott and Mr. Gupta say was validated. But there's another piece as well, which is that particularly large global companies have, what they call, a global business model. They put the work in the country that makes the most sense.

Take IBM for example. They're not a particularly Canadian company. If IBM is going to create a lot of jobs in Canada it's not a matter of whether they're.... Arguably, they're offshoring it or outsourcing it to Canada rather than away from Canada, if some work comes here. So Canadian leaders of many of these companies are actually competing with the leaders of their companies in other countries for what they call a global mandate.

I'm sure you may have noticed the recent IBM announcement where both the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario made a contribution around analytics in Ontario—a very significant investment, altogether close to $100 million. The reason why it's happening here is that IBM actually happens to have a lot of analytics talent in this country already. They acquired a number of companies in Ontario, the largest of which was in Ottawa, but a number of others as well. That's why we got that mandate. It wasn't because IBM likes Canada. It's because the skills are here. So the point of this is that if we want to get more mandates here, we need to create those skill clusters.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

I'll change the subject completely now to the educational side. I was a professor at Centennial and Humber colleges. They didn't teach anything very specific; they were teaching fundamentals. The way I would summarize it was that they were teaching people to think. It's really up to the industries to train them for the specific jobs they're going after.

Do you feel it's possible to incorporate the changes that industry demands into the current educational curriculum, particularly given the pace of change, etc., that's involved in industry?

[David Ticoll]

We've done it. Three years ago we designed a new program called business technology management. We formed a committee of about half a dozen employers and half a dozen universities. We designed a set of learning outcomes. We convinced the universities that this was an opportunity. It was based on a lot of existing programs in business schools called management information systems. Still, it was a lead for many of them, and many of them started new ones from scratch.

We designed it in several months. Within a year, 2010, the degree was being granted by one university. It's now in 10 universities across Canada. We expect it to be in another 10 or 15 within the next couple of years.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

That's all wonderful, but did it produce the types of skills that were needed by industry?

[David Ticoll]

Yes, it did. The graduates of these programs are all getting jobs.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Okay.

Mr. Gupta.

[Karna Gupta]

On the educational side, the expansion of co-op programs or similar programs is important. A big part is that the student needs to go to university, then go to work, and then come back. Often what happens is that a big part of our cohorts who are not in co-op programs go through universities or schools for three, four, or five years. By the time they come out with what they've learned, the context of the workplace has changed very dramatically. To expect the private sector to then pick up these kids and train them in the new technology that's coming out is much harder and more expensive.

The model probably needs to be slightly different. Some of this stuff is going on at Cambridge University, where they have a much more robust exchange going back and forth between universities and the private sector. There's an ongoing engagement in terms of going back and forth.

The panel has talked about different things. One is incentives to companies that will bring in students beyond co-op, through some credits, to hire them and train them and then send them back to school. That probably would create a different type of outcome from what we're facing.

We have two outcomes to this. Some kids are going through co-op. They're engaged with industry. Then a large majority of the graduates are completely detached. If you're in an engineering program, you're detached for five years.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

From my teaching experience at Humber College, unfortunately, the sad fact was that probably fewer than 10% were Canadian students. Almost everybody else was a foreign student. Then we train, and they don't necessarily stay in the country—I put a few of them into RIM, by the way.

Let me just ask another question along the same lines, but I got the idea from that one there. Can you highlight any particular strategies within the industry to address any specific skills shortages that you can anticipate stemming from Canada's aging population? Is there any correlation like that we need to be starting to address?

[Karna Gupta]

I'll answer the first part of the question in terms of where the shortages are. The major one we hear, when I poll several of our members, is in the area of business analysts with a technical skill. So we have raw technical skills with no business analytics attached to them as to how they should work in a business context, and that's where the most significant gap is. That is consistent.

I could take all of my members in ITAC and go through all the president-CEOs and ask where the gaps are, and that will probably come up as number one. We know, categorically, there is a significant shortage there.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Mr. Elliott, did you want to make any comments on any of those?

[Morgan Elliott]

Just to echo some of the previous comments that were made and to address the first part of your question, as in all problems there's never an easy solution. It takes a whole bunch of different pieces to put it together.

If I'm able to back you up a bit, part of the problem for the ICT sector was some of the fallout from the 1990s technology bubble, when unrealistic valuations and mass unemployment in the area really scared a lot of people away—even a lot of the guidance counsellors in high schools. We need to start there. We're back into the high schools and elementary schools trying to encourage people to go into the maths and sciences, to have that background.

That's why we really believe in the co-op placements, because we find that the students who have had a co-op placement adjust more quickly. Even after spending a term or two at a business, they'll go back and maybe even change what they're learning in school to be more up to date with the skills that are needed and in demand. The great thing about a co-op is that you can make your errors and your mistakes without adversely affecting your entire career at a company.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

I have one more question. We talked about seeing where the puck is going, and of course, RIM is investing $1.5 billion in research. In the land of the blind, you're the one-eyed monster there.

Can you tell us where you think the technology industry is going?

[Morgan Elliott]

Are you looking to invest money?

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

It could be.

[Morgan Elliott]

If you look at the smart phone industry overall, it's still a tiny portion of the traditional clamshell phone that you think of.

A lot of areas like Africa and the Middle East are still on 2G technology. For a lot of these people, a smart phone is their first encounter with a computer. This is a computing device for them; it's not only a phone. They're using it for all sorts of different uses that we never thought of when we created the BlackBerry.

For example, if you talk to the ambassador of South Africa, they use the BlackBerry—and this is not a commercial for RIM, by any means—to tackle attendance programs. There are police forces in the UK that are using it so that people can spend more time on the beat. They can check records. They can check warrants. We're seeing all sorts of different things in that area.

Where technology is going in the smart phone industry—things like near field communication, your mobile wallet, your ID, your credentials—that's going to be your one computing device.

There are already companies in Europe that instead of.... I know MPs have a little pin, but for the rest of us who have ID cards, the ID card won't be around your neck anymore, it'll be on your hip. Everything that you can think of that you're using in your wallet now will be in your smart phone. That's where it's going in the short term.

[Joe Daniel, Conservative, Don Valley East, ON]

Are there any very brief comments from the other two, since I've run out of time?

[David Ticoll]

It will be smart everything. Everything will have smarts inside it.

[Karna Gupta]

I will make a comment on where technology's going in terms of what we hear, so that you have the same sense of what we're hearing from our members.

There are three things that come to the table all the time when we talk technology now. One is that everything is mobile, including your health care, your patient records, doctor's records. Everything should be mobile.

Second, they all talk about everything being about big data. This means that if you look at a power corporation with a smart grid and everything else, the amount of data that will be transferred about you, your house, and your consumption is tremendous. So there is a huge demand for analytics in this space, and how to deal with it. Big data is the second big thing that's unfolding.

Third, government is evolving and it's all about cloud computing. Government is involved in large discussions with shared services, and how you deal with that. So everything is in the cloud—private cloud, public cloud, hybrid cloud. It is all cloud.

So if you look at it from the point of technical needs, skills, and talent, those are the things we should talk about in the schools and universities, in terms of why these things are important, how you use them, and what it means career-wise.

[David Ticoll]

May I add one more thing?

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Go ahead.

[David Ticoll]

I was talking about this concept of a mashup, and what we are seeing now is that it's not just the kinds of things that we do in the ICT sector, as Morgan and Karna talked about. In every other field, technology will be integral to what happens in that field.

You'll have smart hospital beds. Just in health care there are probably a half-dozen different things going on—bioinformatics, health informatics, what have you.

You can apply the same thing to every other sector, whether it's in the arts, or in various natural sciences, or engineering. So what is feeding the cloud, the smart grid, or the analytics that Karna is talking about are processors, which you're going to have everywhere—in your power networks, in your plumbing networks, and your municipal sewage systems—that are monitoring everything that's going on. So the people who do those kinds of things are going to need to understand the technology of IT and the technology of that specific field.

To come back to your first question, we are seeing a lot of innovation in post-secondary programs to offer that kind of education, and we need more of it.

[The Chair, Conservative, Ed Komarnicki]

Thank you very much. You certainly extended that into a good lengthy round.

We'll go to Mr. Cuzner.

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

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thanks to the three witnesses for being here and sharing their insights. It's pretty good for three geeks.

[Voices]

Oh, oh!

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

The Ontario tax credit for the apprenticeships, for the co-ops, has been mentioned in past testimony. What you're advocating is that you believe a federal credit would also serve us well.

Could we get comments from the three of you? It came from Morgan, but could you share the insight? Is it a pretty easy tool to deal with from your perspective?