Maybe I'll start with the first question you asked, and it's an important one: why is there so much unemployment out there? We're saying there's a skills shortage. In the ICT sector the jobs tend to go where the skills are. If the available skill pull is not what you need, your jobs are going to migrate out, and that's what's happening. The kids who are coming out aren't necessarily in the sector and trained to do the jobs we need done.
A great example is that from a developer point of view, at a very young age, for every 10 .NET developers there is only one job as a developer. So we need to understand where the pressures are, what's going on in the marketplace, and what the needs are. If they're not trained for the right thing, the jobs are not going to come to them. That's the first point.
As David mentioned, the ICT sector unemployment continues to be at the 2% to 3% level—much lower than what we see in the economy. The second point you raised was on what we need to do. I think the private sector does have a responsibility here. We need to post the jobs and create the conditions for the right jobs in the country. At the end of the day the talent must be available. Most of the companies are managing toward the bottom line, and there are economic factors at play. If the job skills are not available, those talents migrate.
I talked to my son who is in engineering school. He won't be competing with the local graduates when he graduates; he'll be competing with graduates coming out of Hong Kong. So the magnitude of competition has changed very dramatically, as companies need to be global as well. For any technology company in Canada to be successful they must do business internationally. Our market, by nature, is very small. We have 30 million people and a very small market. So if you want our ICT sector to be strong and robust, these companies need to go international and global. There is a need to attract talent, and they have access to talent globally. We need to compete on that level.
Our training programs in schools and universities need to change. That's the new narrative David talked about. Our training programs need to be much more up to date, and our scholastics need to be different to compete globally. It's a multi-dimensional problem. But the issue is that where we find ourselves today, everything needs to be dealt with in some sequence. The private sector is responsible for creating jobs locally, but the policy framework from the government needs to help support it. Partnerships need to be developed between the private sector, the public sector, and academia to make sure we're creating the right skills resources.