ESDC has put forward the future skills centre. An RFP went out in May 2018, and that call for proposals and applications is now closed. The selected organization will be announced shortly. That's my understanding. The centre is dedicated to understanding the skills of the future and how best to take workers—ideally before they have to be laid off—and reskill them so they can keep their jobs in the economy of tomorrow. That's at ESDC.
At ISED we have a number of programs. We mentioned CanCode earlier. We also fund Mitacs, which is really about work-integrated learning and dovetails with what some of the private sector firms have told us. BHER, the Business/Higher Education Roundtable, has called on the government and large firms to ensure that 100% of college and university students have access to work-integrated learning opportunities before they graduate.
Mitacs feeds into that objective. There is CanCode, as I mentioned, and we worked very closely with ESDC and IRCC on the global skills strategy. That's something Minister Bains heard very clearly from firms during the consultations on the innovation agenda. They were having a hard time bringing in global talent, so as a result of work in our department and others, there is now a two-week turnaround time that's being met over 90% of the time for global skills people coming in. The preliminary stats are that for every person who comes in with top global talent, 11 jobs are created for Canadians, so bringing in global talent creates jobs here.
Skills are a really important focus in the department, and there are a number of initiatives under way.