NEWS
Wanted: IT workers
Employment Companies like Professional Quality Assurance feeling the squeeze


TelegraphJournal.Com - Article published Monday, April 7, 2008 Monday June 16th, 2008

Professional Quality Assurance needs to hire nearly 30 workers in the next two months.

The Fredericton-based information technology firm is doubling its annual sales growth for at least the next three years but is struggling to find employees to keep pace.

Province-wide, the burgeoning IT sector is suffering from a labour pool that has been steadily shrinking since the dot-com bust of 2001. During that period, the number of students enrolled in the various IT disciplines at the University of New Brunswick has sunk from 1,000 to 400.

Trades program enrolments, meanwhile, are on the rise in anticipation of an energy boom in the Saint John area, with community colleges adding 341 seats next September.

Keith McIntosh, president of Professional Quality Assurance, calls the provincial focus on trades worker recruitment a "short-term vision" that leaves out the more sustainable IT sector.

"Over the long term, the exportable services and products in the global economy will come from the knowledge industry,"says McIntosh."Focusing solely on the trades might bring short-term gain, but I think they need to have a longer- term outlook."

The problem facing the IT sector is rooted in misconceptions that dissuade prospective students from enrolling in these post-secondary programs, says Tom Buckley, registrar for UNB?s Saint John campus.

Concerns over the sector?s sustainability sparked after the dot-com bust remain to this day, Buckley says. And recent growth in the sector has been focused on back-office operations, rather than purely IT firms, which are more appealing and have a higher profile, he says.

"Too many people are missing an opportunity to start a career in this field," says Buckley, formerly a human resources executive with Moncton-based OAO Technology Solutions. "It would have an impact on the economy?s growth.  We have companies in New Brunswick that are competing internationally with innovative products and ideas."

IT executives operating out of Saint John earn annual salaries between $80,000 and $120,000, paying nearly double the provincial taxes that average New Brunswick workers dole out ever year, says Jeff Roach, executive director of economic development group Catalict.

"Bringing in more people into our sector is going to bring more money into our tax base than any other sector,"he says.

And yet, Professional Quality Assurance and other IT firms across the province, including Mariner Partners, are feeling the squeeze of a labour shortage.

McIntosh says he expects to hire a new executive in the next few months to assume responsibility of training new employees with limited educational backgrounds, and working with government to bring renewed focus to the IT sector?s labour needs.

The company president says he is also mulling a boot camp training session for the summer, providing prospective employees with free instruction on software use in a move to fill vacant positions.

"We have more work and more clients asking us to provide them with resources now than we ever have," says McIntosh.

"We need to build more training programs within the province. We?ve had some discussions with the community college and we have to put more emphasis on that."