Executive Summary

Recruitment Conditions: Employers will confront Pervasive Skills Shortages:

1. Between 2011 and 2016, Canadian employers will need to hire approximately 106,000 ICT workers. This is an annual hiring rate of around 17,700 persons. In light of the specialized skills and the mix of technical skills and business understanding that is sought by the majority of employers, these hiring requirements will pose serious and pervasive challenges.

2. In most regions and for most ICT Occupations, employers will encounter systemic shortages when recruiting for ICT jobs that require five or more years of experience. The severity of these shortages will increase when employers are looking for individuals with leading edge skills or with particular combinations of domain experience and ICT expertise. Conversely, most employers will encounter little or no difficulty in recruiting for ICT jobs that require less than five years of experience or for which recent graduates would be qualified.

3. Acute and pervasive skills shortages will affect four occupations in particular:

• Computer and Information Systems Managers,
• Telecommunications Carriers Managers,
• Information Systems Analysts and Consultants, and
• Broadcast Technicians.

For Information Systems Analysts and Consultants, the primary driver of shortages is increasing demand counterposed with the limited capacity to train ICT professionals with the mix of ICT and business skills that are required in this occupation. In the other three occupations where shortages will be acute, demographic factors are the major explanation.

4. Conversely, over much of the forecast period, and in many regions, supply will exceed demand for three occupations:

• Computer Programmers and Interactive Media Developers,
• Computer Network technicians, and
• User Support Technicians.

In general replacement demand for these occupations will be lower, owing to the younger age structure of the labour force. Technology trends — notably the emergence of 'Cloud' computing and 'virtualization' — will weaken the growth in demand for Computer Network Technicians. Demand for Computer Programmers and for User Support Technicians will be undercut by the growth of outsourcing and off-shoring. However, and this is critically important, notwithstanding an overall tendency for supply to exceed demand in these occupations, employers will still have difficulty recruiting individuals with specific skills and experience. For example, employers in some regions will have challenges recruiting computer programmers with experience in java or .Net or with experience in supporting specific types of ERP applications (e.g., PeopleSoft or SAP). Similarly, although there will be more persons seeking user support technician jobs than there will be job openings, many employers will have difficulty recruiting candidates with the appropriate industry certifications, e.g., Cisco, MSCE, Oracle, etc.

Labour Market Conditions for Job-Seekers:

5. In most regions and for most ICT occupations, recent graduates of co-op or internship programs will generally be able to obtain employment that is commensurate with their training. However, graduates from traditional programs that do not have a practicum component will experience much longer search periods. In many cases, they will be obliged to take ICT jobs for which they are over-qualified.

6. Recently arrived internationally educated professionals (IEPs), who have no Canadian experience, will have considerable difficulty in securing an ICT job that is commensurate with their qualifications, unless their English or French language skills are strong. Bridging programs that combine language improvement, training in Canadian business practices, and an internship will have their maximum benefit in the ICT labour market conditions that are projected. IEPs without Canadian experience that do not utilise integrative bridging programs will need to consider jobs for which they are over-qualified.

Pervasive Mismatch between Skill Requirements and Skill Supply:

7. At the heart of the skills shortage challenge is a pervasive mismatch between the capabilities that employers require and the skills and experience (or lack thereof) of many job-seekers. Over the course of the past decade, employers became increasingly dissatisfied with ICT professionals who had suitable technical skills, but who lacked soft skills or relevant business experience. As a result, a new capabilities profile emerged. This capabilities profile included technical skills, soft skills (team working ability, communications skills, etc.) and context skills, i.e., an understanding of the business needs and business processes to which ICT is applied. By the end of the last decade (if not earlier), this broader capabilities profile had become the new norm for employers seeking to fill ICT jobs. As more employers adopted the broader capabilities profile for ICT jobs, their difficulty in recruiting candidates who met these expanded requirements increased. At the same time, meeting the requirements of the broader capabilities profile also posed increasing problems for recent graduates and for IEPs, as well as for many laid-off ICT professionals seeking re-employment. By the end of the last decade it was apparent that there was a pervasive asymmetry in the ICT labour market between the capabilities profile sought by many employers and the skills and experience of many job-seekers, especially recent graduates and IEPs.

8. For some time it has been evident that occupations that require only ICT skills are growing slowly, if at all, while occupations that require a combination of ICT skills and other domain skills are growing rapidly. Two types of skill profiles are in demand. The first combines ICT skills with an understanding of business processes including an understanding of the specific context in which a business or organization operates. The second combines ICT skills with the technical skills that are important to another field, for example, a particular industry or sector. The post-secondary system is adjusting to this change in skill needs, but has been slow to do so. Too many students still enrol in programs that are focused only on ICT. They inevitably find that the jobs that correspond to that skill profile are growing slowly and may even be declining. Employers, for their part, increasingly rely on experience thresholds to filter out job-seekers who are likely to lack either an understanding of business processes or domain-specific technical skills. So pervasive is this reliance on experience thresholds that experience requirements have now become embedded in the ICT labour market. The result is a large number of job-seekers who cannot meet the experience requirements and an equally large number of employers who have constant challenges in meeting their hiring needs. In the absence of a concerted strategy involving industry, governments and the post-secondary system, these conditions will not change and the skill shortages will grow worse.

9. To change the way the ICT labour market serves both employers and job-seekers will require a strategy that addresses the pervasive mismatch between the capability profile sought by employers and the skills and experience profile of job-seekers. There are four dimensions to this challenge:

• the design of post-secondary programs,
• managing the transition from graduation to employment,
• integrating IEPs into the Canadian labour market, and
• expanding the re-skilling opportunities available to current ICT professionals.

A complete strategy needs to address all four dimensions of the mismatch challenge. The relative importance of these four dimensions will differ across regions.

Women in ICT:

10. Although there is anecdotal evidence that some employers and post-secondary institutions are endeavouring to change the current (and significant) gender imbalance in ICT, the overall trends do not appear to have changed. ICT is still approximately 75% male. The gender imbalance compounds the skills shortage problem by limiting the qualified pool from which employers can recruit. This is not a future prospect. It is already happening.

11. While the initiatives of individual employers and post-secondary institutions are encouraging, they are not commensurate with the scale of the problem. Only a broadly-based strategy, founded on an industry and post-secondary partnership, has the potential to alter the current gender imbalance.

Changing our Understanding of ICT Careers:

12. The nature of ICT careers is changing. In the 1990s, ICT occupations were understood predominantly as technical occupations that required an affinity for applied mathematics and, depending on the nature of the job, various degrees of post-secondary training that emphasized pure and applied mathematics. Over the course of the last decade, employers came to view ICT occupations and ICT careers in a different light. Significantly more emphasis was put on the need for an understanding of the business or organizational context in which ICT was applied. The ICT occupations which grew the fastest in the last decade were those that combined an understanding of ICT with an understanding of business. A consequence of this change was a transformation in the capabilities profile sought by employers and a corresponding change in the nature of ICT careers. Employers re-defined ICT occupations as requiring 'soft skills' and context skills, as well as technical ICT skills. Many of these new ICT occupations still require significant post-secondary training in mathematics and applied mathematics. However, the purely technical focus that defined a great many ICT occupations in the 1990s has been replaced by a new emphasis on soft skills and context skills (paragraph 7 above).

13. There is a significant disjuncture between the prevailing perception of ICT careers as quintessentially technical occupations and the way that ICT occupations and ICT careers were re-defined and re-shaped over the last decade. This mismatch between prevailing perceptions and the new reality of what ICT careers are about limits the flow of talent into ICT and thereby perpetuates many of the skills shortages that characterize the ICT labour market. The industry-based Coalition for Tomorrow's ICT Skills is playing an important role in communicating the significance of the changes in the nature of ICT careers to governments, students, and the education system. However, much remains to be done. There is still a significant lag between broader perceptions of ICT careers and the actual nature of those careers and the capabilities they require.

Strengthening Our Understanding of the ICT Labour Market:

14. The occupational definitions that are used to track trends in the labour market are increasingly 'out of sync' with the realities of the ICT labour market. There are two dimensions to this problem:

First, some occupational definitions are far too broad. For example, 'Information Systems Analysts and Consultants' make up one-quarter of the ICT work force, while 'Computer Programmers and Interactive Media Developers' account for 15%. There is more change happening within these occupational definitions than the aggregated data reveal;

Second, one of the most important trends is the emergence of occupations that require both ICT skills and skills from another domain. E-health is an obvious example, but there are scores of others. ICT is re-shaping the skill requirements of a great many occupations. Current statistical measures do not track these changes.

Effective human resources planning requires labour market information that is timely, accurate, regionally-specific and relevant. Our current statistical resources fall short of meeting that need. It is imperative that industry, governments and statistical agencies address the need for better information.

Continuity of Trends and Changes in Trends: The 2008 and 2011 Outlooks Compared:

15. The 2011 Outlook builds on and refines previous Outlooks that were released in 2004, 2006 and 2008. Frequent revisiting of forecasts is essential to maintain relevance. Every stakeholder in the ICT labour market understands how rapidly changes occur in technology, skill requirements, business structure and human resources management strategies. Most of the key trends identified in the 2008 Outlook remain important today. However, other trends have also emerged since 2008:

• The 2011 Outlook confirms a central conclusion of the 2008 Outlook: there will be pervasive and serious shortages of Information Systems Analysts and Consultants (Business Analysts). The drivers behind this shortage are changes in how employers understand their skills requirements and a lag in the post-secondary system's response to this change in skills needs.
• In the 2008 Outlook, demographic factors were seen as causing serious shortages of persons qualified by training and experience to be Computer and Information Systems Managers. The 2011 Outlook confirms this projection and also signals that demographically driven shortages will also dominate hiring for Telecommunications Managers and Broadcast Technicians.
• For Computer Engineers and Software Engineers, the nature of shortages changes somewhat from a generic shortage to one that focuses the increased difficulty that employers will confront when seeking to hire 'highly qualified' professionals, especially in R&D roles.
• In the 2008 Outlook, 'Cloud' computing and 'virtualization' were noted, but their impact was not directly factored into the projections. In the 2011 Outlook, these technologies are seen as having two effects. The first is to reduce the demand for certain occupations, notably mid-level computer programmers and network support technicians. The second impact is to change skill needs to accommodate the shift to Cloud computing and virtualization.
• In the 2011 Outlook, more emphasis is also put on the impact of Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). SOA significantly increases the demand for high-level programmers — 'architects', SOA also changes skill requirements for programmers. In particular, java and .Net skills become more important. In the longer run, however, SOA reduces the marginal cost of developing and supporting a new application or extending an existing application.
• The 2008 Outlook highlighted the skills shortages related to supporting 'legacy' applications. These skills shortages will continue to be a problem for the major public and private sector employers that rely on those systems and applications.
• For the 2011-2016 forecast period, the 2011 Outlook interprets the higher Canadian dollar as a 'structural feature' of the Canadian economy rather than cyclical occurrence that will soon be reversed. The higher dollar will encourage more off-shoring of 'commodity' ICT work and will also constrain the growth of 'near-shoring', i.e., the export of ICT services to the U.S. These trends will weaken demand for 'Tier 1' User Support Technicians and for Computer Programmers who do lower-value programming and application support. In the 2011 Outlook, these trends are more pronounced than in the 2008 Outlook.
• The 2008 Outlook described changes in the skills requirements of employers, in particular the 'package of skills' sought by employers - technical skill, 'soft skills' and experience. The 2011 Outlook interprets these changes as having become embedded in the ICT labour market and fundamentally changing the capabilities profile sought by the majority of employers and the nature of ICT careers.
• In the 2008 Outlook, the focus was on enrolments in traditional IT, computer science and computer and software engineering programs. In 2008, enrolments in these programs had fallen sharply and were continuing to decline. Enrolments in these traditional programs have now stabilized. Equally importantly, the efforts of the Coalition for Tomorrow's ICT Skills has led many universities to introduce Business Technology Management (BTM) programs that will better align the skills of new graduates with the skills required by employers.
• The 2011 Outlook takes account of somewhat lower immigration levels of ICT professionals than had occurred in the years prior to 2008. At the same time, the 2011 Outlook also factors into its supply side estimates the use of Temporary Foreign Workers (TFWs).

16. The central human resources planning issues identified in the 2008 Outlook will continue to be important in light of the trends identified in the 2011 Outlook. In the absence of focused, sector-based strategies, employers will face widespread and pervasive skills shortages. These shortages will arise principally from a widespread mismatch between the skills and capabilities that employers need and the skills and experience of many job-seekers. The shortages will continue until new post-secondary programs alter the nature of supply. Graduates of post-secondary programs that do not have a practicum component will face an especially lengthy, and often disappointing, search for employment. Accelerating the integration of internationally educated professionals will continue to be important as well as the need for a more structured approach to the graduation-to-employment transition of recent graduates. And finally, there will continue to be a need for well-grounded occupational standards and an expansion of the culture of ICT professionalism with its attendant commitments to ongoing learning and continuing competence.