Mississauga, Ont.
What if colleges offered a degree (or a diploma or a certificate) and nobody came? That’s the dilemma now facing the administrators of many information technology (IT) programs across Canada.
Creating an IT training program used to be a sure ticket, even for mediocre institutions. And there were plenty of jobs chasing the graduates.
Now, the pendulum has swung in a nasty direction. Yukon College in Whitehorse, to cite one example, will produce only one IT graduate this year. Nationwide, enrolment in these programs is down from 20 to 70 per cent from three years ago. What’s going on and what does the future hold?
To answer those question, the deans of information technology programs from colleges, CEGEPs and technical institutions assembled here last week for the first National IT Human Resource Forum. They were joined by industry reps from companies such as Microsoft, Cisco and Nortel Networks, who presumably will eventually want to hire some IT grads.
Paul Brennan, of the Association of Canadian Community Colleges, confirmed that “we’re facing a crisis in terms of IT enrolments.” He also noted that the progress in bringing women into the field has essentially halted.
“We were up to around 45 to 50 per cent females in college IT programs,” he said, “and now it’s dropped back to around 10 per cent.”
Maybe these women know something.
The deans shared these “doom and gloom” stories, then went on to form a national organization. For now, at least, they’re restricting membership to the publicly supported colleges. Universities and private training institutions certainly play a role in training IT professionals, but the college folks seem to feel they have enough problems of their own.
John O’Grady, a Toronto-based labour market economist, provided some much-needed hard data on IT employment in Canada. During the boom of 2000-2001, he reported, Canada’s IT sector gained 110,000 jobs to peak out at about 570,000 employees.
Of course, they weren’t all working for IBM or Microsoft – this counts people doing IT work in all kinds of companies and government departments. Then came the shocks of mid-2001. Nortel collapsed, leaving the Ottawa job scene a grim battlefield. The dominos fell across the country. O’Grady says this downturn cost the Canadian IT sector 44,000 jobs, hitting rock bottom around January 2002.
Since then, there has been an “uneven recovery,” with jobs regained and then lost. The curve is flattening out at just over 550,000 IT workers. The latest trend is “cost-driven restructuring” that is just about cancelling out the effect of new IT projects.
Coincidentally, I was seated at the Mississauga meeting with a senior human resources specialist from Nortel, who was actually quite sunny about the future. “Of course we’re not hiring now,” she said, “but with all the retirements coming up in the next decade, I’m sure we will need to hire, but it will be the right people.”
Ah, there’s the rub. Everybody wants an IT grad with solid technical skills, five to 10 years experience in a specific industry, and who doesn’t look at his or her shoes while talking. Fair enough, but where are the new grads going to get that experience? With entry-level jobs, and even co-op placements simply evaporating, what’s a Millennial to do?
Yes, a Millennial. That’s the term Michael Parkhill, Microsoft Canada’s academic director, used to describe people born in or after 1982. He says that year marked a sea change in humankind, perhaps because IBM had just brought out its Personal Computer and Microsoft was selling DOS 1.0 to go with it.
Parkhill says Millennials are “digital natives” because they have grown up with technology. (The rest of us are “digital immigrants.”) Eight out of 10 Millennials feel it’s cool to be smart, according to Parkhill. They process information in parallel, not necessarily in sequence like us old geezers.
So, when your teenager has five or six chat windows open but is “doing my social homework,” we’re supposed to believe it. According to Parkhill, those chat windows are indeed often homework related, and the stronger students are now helping to pull up the weaker ones, creating a new educational dynamic. In fact, he painted a picture of a future where educational video games are mandatory, and mothers tell kids, “You can’t go out to play with your friends until you’re done with your video games.”
Parkhill says that Millennials tend to have a global perspective and are exhibiting expanded neural capacity. On the downside, they often have the attention span of flies, shattered faith in institutions and a “fragmented sense of time.”
Needless to say, Millennials will not be looking for careers that involve sitting in cubicles for 70 hours a week writing programs.
In fact, when asked if the term “computer programmer” even makes sense anymore, Parkhill said you need to be a lot more specific, e.g.
“an ASP .Net developer.”
Of course, a Microsoft guy would say that!
The bottom line coming out of the forum is that, yes, there will be jobs and there will be IT programs in colleges.
But we’re probably not headed back to the glory days where those who could spell programmer could get a job, and those who could write the word could become IT instructors.
Even with all those looming retirements, outsourcing and offshoring will keep the HR demands of Canada’s IT industry in check, all but drying up the low-level and entry jobs. Yet employers keep demanding that five to 10 years relevant experience.
What we really need is a magic pill that a Millennial can swallow to add a few inches around the midsection, thin out that bushy mop of hair, blur the eyesight a bit and transform the born-in-1982 wunderkind into an experienced systems professional.
Now I am not saying that Microsoft is working on this, but I did notice that they recently obtained a patent on using human skin as a data transmission medium. Maybe Bill Gates has another trick up his sleeve to match the wonders of DOS 1.0.
Let’s hope.
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(Tom Keenan is a professor at the University of Calgary and an expert on technology and its social implications. He can be reached at keenan@businessedge.ca)
