Thank you, Mr. Chair and honourable committee members. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today about dev degree. Dev degree is Shopify's work-integrated learning program.
For those of you unfamiliar with Shopify, we are a multi-channel commerce platform. Entrepreneurs use our software to set up, design, and manage their stores, their businesses. This includes online stores and brick-and-mortar locations. Over 600,000 businesses in more than 175 countries rely on Shopify's technology to power their businesses.
We are a fiercely proud Canadian company. Our headquarters are just a few blocks away from us here in Ottawa. We have two offices in Toronto, two in Kitchener-Waterloo, one in Montreal, and one in San Francisco. We employ over 3,000 people who come to work every day hungry to make commerce better for everyone, everywhere.
In 2016, Shopify partnered with Carleton University to launch a revolutionary work-integrated learning program called dev degree. Dev degree was created to solve systemic issues with how people enter the tech industry. Shopify's dev degree features a globally recognized and accredited computer science degree with 4,500 hours of hands-on work experience, a competitive salary, paid tuition, and seven weeks of annual leave. Just for reference, 4,500 hours of work experience is roughly nine times the hours in a traditional co-op program. Each graduating dev degree student will have received at least $160,000 in financial support.
Obtaining a degree in computer science or software engineering is a typical path to becoming a software developer. These degrees often take four to five years to complete, sometimes longer. The large-scale complex problems that face software developers in the workplace cannot be taught easily in academia. Also, keeping pace and teaching industry-current technologies is extremely challenging for academia.
There's really no substitute for hands-on learning by doing. Without this, it can take an additional six months to two years for a new graduate to reach productivity. With dev degree, the amazing thing that we're seeing is meaningful contributions from the students in their second year in the program. This is three years earlier than the traditional model, which is remarkable.
Just while we're talking about it, the co-op model is 60 years old. There are some challenges with it, especially in modern times. Typical computer science co-op placements are approximately four months. Realistically, this is nowhere near enough time to learn the necessary tools, technologies, and practices required to have a meaningful impact. When students do co-op placements at different companies, they start from scratch each time. The end result is that people struggle to build depth in their skills and work on more substantial problems. I think many of us have experienced this.
University students are often away from home for the first time. University can be quite different from their experiences so far. Cohorts of students at the university are often very large. Professors struggle to get to know the students personally. It's no surprise that students often struggle. Typically 30% to 40% of computer science students drop out between the first and second years of the program.
Students in dev degree are provided two mentors during their time in the dev degree program: a life-at-Shopify mentor, when they are working at Shopify, who is a trusted friend and guide; and a technical mentor who guides them in their daily work. The dev degree students also find tremendous support from each other, the cohort of students in the program with them. What's really neat to watch is that they call one another family, and this support for one another is amazing to behold.
All of these issues that I've talked about compound and contribute to talent shortage for Canadian tech companies. Tech companies are powered by creativity and solving problems that have never been seen before. We need these minds to be working on these problems.
In the program, it has been common for teams to ask to keep their student even in their second year. Nevertheless, we rotate them through different teams every eight months to develop a diverse set of skills such as web, mobile, security, data, and other in-demand technologies.
A typical week for a dev degree student involves three to four classes on campus with our university partners and 25 hours of working with teams at Shopify. By the time they graduate, they receive 4,500 hours of hands-on work experience. This allows the students to contribute to product development at Shopify even before they graduate and to hone their craft by the time they graduate.
There's a significant diversity gap in the technology ecosystem in Canada and around the world. Data shows that only 12% of software development positions in our industry are held by women. It's even lower for indigenous and LGBTQ+ Canadians. Our merchants are quite diverse, representing very similar proportions in society. As a result, a diverse team of employees helps us understand them and meet their needs.