Bye-bye four-year degree. Canadian companies want workers faster

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Last summer, Marcos Chumacero, an out-of-work bar manager, lolled about his downtown Toronto apartment as the world slowed to a crawl and the federal government went on COVID-19 damage control.

“Like everyone else in my industry, I was collecting CERB,” he recalled, referring to the $2,000-per-month emergency benefit.

A chance call to an acquaintance in social work changed his life. The friend told Chumacero, 30, about NPower, a charity that retrains younger workers who lack computer skills for jobs in the information-technology (IT) industry. He applied and was accepted into a three-month program in September that taught computer protocols and networking among other related subject matter.

No more CERB.

By January, Chumacero had landed a job at Touchbistro Inc., a payments software firm for restaurants, as a bilingual product technician. He’s earning slightly less than the $5,000 per month he averaged as an experienced bartender, but that income came with 60-hour work weeks. Touchbistro asks for only 40 hours per week. The new job is also secure, comes with benefits and offers a path for upward career growth.

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“They were not just looking for someone who was tech savvy, but someone who was outgoing, well spoken, obviously bilingual in this case, and that had the drive to learn fast,” he said.

Chumacero’s rapid transformation to IT specialist from bartender is one that Canada’s red-hot technology companies hope thousands of others will replicate. The latest Statistics Canada data show the professional, scientific and technical services sector had more than 46,600 job vacancies in March. Last week, Economic Development Minister Mélanie Joly suggested the need was even greater, telling reporters on June 3 that the Greater Toronto Area alone had 70,000 vacant technology positions.

There is a war on talent right now right across Canada and a lot of companies … can’t hire fast enough

Rob Davis, chief diversity and inclusion officer at KPMG Canada

Tech companies have struggled to find qualified workers for years. The skills shortage is now even more acute because the COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated the shift to a digital economy in which STEM skills and knowledge are key. For example, education, which has been carried out largely on the internet for the past year, is now at a place that some experts thought would take a decade to reach, according to a report last year by the federal Industry Strategy Council.

But Canada’s workforce wasn’t ready for such a drastic shift, as most of the jobs were in non-technical sectors, such as healthcare and social assistance, retail, and construction. The mismatch is forcing the private sector to step up with training programs tailored for the jobs on offer, rather than wait on a post-secondary education system based on a four-year university degree.

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“There is a war on talent right now right across Canada and a lot of companies, including KPMG, just sort of can’t hire fast enough,” said Rob Davis, chief diversity and inclusion officer at KPMG Canada, a consulting firm. “I think that fact alone to me says that, perhaps, we need another avenue, another source of talent than the traditional university type of degree.”

Canadian technology companies had started relying on immigration to fill the gaps. That remains an important part of the solution, but the pandemic-induced border closures exposed the downside to counting on international pipelines to fill empty positions.

Davis, along with other executives, said that rather than waiting on economic immigrants, Canada needs to overhaul its approach to training to take advantage of the large pool of workers that were left stranded by the recession. There is a plethora of workers available for retraining, as the economic downturn has pushed long-term unemployment to record levels. Statistics Canada data released last week put the number of people who had been unemployed for longer than 27 weeks at 478,000, a 166.8 per cent increase from the start of the pandemic.

By the time you finish a four-year degree, what you learn at the beginning of those four years may no longer be relevant

D’Andre Wilson-Ihejirika, director of programming and employment partnerships at Elevate

Traditional paths into digital and knowledge-based jobs, where a person typically spends four or five years at university before going into the workforce, aren’t always flexible enough to meet the needs of employers, said D’Andre Wilson-Ihejirika, director of programming and employment partnerships at Elevate, the non-profit that runs annual technology festivals.

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“We know that technology is constantly changing and shifting very quickly,” Wilson-Ihejirika said. “So by the time you finish a four-year degree, what you learn at the beginning of those four years may no longer be relevant.”

As well, people who are already working age don’t always have the luxury of spending more than $40,000 on tuition, while also putting their lives on pause for half a decade to get a STEM degree, Davis said. The sector’s reputation for being dominated by white men creates an additional barrier for marginalized communities.

Joly was in Toronto to announce that the federal government, alongside the City of Toronto, had decided to give Wilson-Ihejirika’s organization $5.8 million to help fund a program that aims to prepare 5,300 people from marginalized communities in the GTA for tech-based jobs. The program lasts three months and focuses on high-demand fields, like project management, data analytics and digital marketing.

“As we know, the tech sector will continue to grow and (will) need to be more inclusive to make sure that everybody is able to have access to its success,” said Joly. If the program is a success, she said it could expand countrywide.

I quite frankly don’t care if they went to school or where they went to school

Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific Labs Inc

Executives are warming up to hiring graduates of such programs, setting aside notions that qualified candidates must have a university degree, said Greg Smith, CEO of Thinkific Labs Inc., a software platform that helps people create and sell their own online courses.

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Smith said Thinkfic’s interview process focuses on previous projects that a candidate has completed and how that has helped him or her acquire the necessary skills. In fact, most of his software developers didn’t go to university for software development. “I quite frankly don’t care if they went to school or where they went to school,” he said. “I care if they can write great code and build great software.”

Coming from a non-tech background can only help an organization, said Sabrina Geremia, who oversees the Canadian operations of Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

Google also has its own certification programs, designed to be completed in six months, that target everyone from existing IT workers who want to add to their skill sets to complete newbies. The training programs focus on high-growth, in-demand fields such as user-experience design, IT and Android development. Geremia describes the “micro-certificates” that participants receive at the end of their training as “Lego blocks” that can either be the start of a base of knowledge or add on to an existing base.

“We are just at a point where the future of work is the future of lifelong learning,” Geremia said.

That’s the case for Chumacero, who used his first block of learning as a springboard to an entirely new career.

“I’ve done everything in the restaurant industry,” he said. “I can’t be convinced to go back.”

• Email: bbharti@postmedia.com | Twitter: biancabharti

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