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| Playing the upswing |
January 19, 2004 |
By Lisa Manfield
When Stephen Devlin completed his e-commerce certificate at the University of British Columbia in 2001, he was ready to take on the dot-com world. At the time he was working as a regional sales manager for Job Shark, a national employment Web site which had experienced “exponential growth from August 1999 to March 2001,” he said. “But then things started to take a hit. One of the problems we encountered was that we weren’t thinking of our long-term goals in terms of how we were going to stay competitive in the marketplace.”
Facing huge declines in the sector, Devlin started to wonder if his future in e-com might be bleak. “I spent quite a bit of money doing e-commerce and everything just collapsed after that. People weren’t using those skills because they weren’t able to find jobs.”
But that whole picture has brightened recently and so have Devlin’s career prospects. He embarked upon a new e-business venture this summer using “a model where people feel like they can connect with what’s happening in their community.” That’s a vague statement because he’s keeping the details closely guarded to avoid competition, but he said it “marries old-world values with technology, and that’s what’s happening now. We’ve kind of come full circle.”
AND UP AGAIN
Devlin is confident that now “there are opportunities in the tech sector” and he’s not the only one who thinks so. Susan Hayes believes that technology is back in a big way. The director of marketing and communications for Workopolis, billed as Canada’s biggest job site, has been monitoring sector growth for the past two years and said overall the demand for tech talent is up. “The biggest area for hiring right now is in application and software development.”
With just less than 3,000 job listings in its technology section, Workopolis is currently seeing the highest level of techrelated postings since November 2001. In October 2003, job postings were up 35 per cent over September 2003, and 80 per cent over October 2002.
“A lot of the positions we’re seeing are more infrastructure-based positions,” Hayes said. “During the dot-com boom, companies were focusing outward.
They were looking at creating opportunities to make money. When that went bust, a lot of companies pulled back and tech became a dirty word…and tech budgets were slashed. But what companies were finding is that you really can’t ignore your technology infrastructure—you will fall behind. So the shift has been to maintain [business stability] through infrastructure, as opposed to building outward.”
A June 2003 poll of 5,000 tech executives by CIO Magazine confirmed that IT spending is increasing. Fiftyfour per cent of respondents planned to boost tech-related expenditures by 5.6 per cent over 12 months. And a January 2003 CIO Magazine poll of 290 IT execs showed one-third of respondents planned to hire in 2004. When asked to specify which skills were most needed, 65 per cent listed application development, 59 per cent said project management, 54 per cent cited networking, 53 per cent said database management and 45 per cent mentioned security.
IIB Canada is one example of a tech company that added significantly to its workforce in the past year. Boasting the largest software development facility in the country, IBM has added “more than 1,000 new employees through a combination of professional hires, campus recruiting, acquisitions and strategic outsourcing contracts,” said Jennifer Ballantyne, an IBM spokesperson on human resources.
With approximately 20,000 employees, up from 11,000 in 1993, IBM Canada is currently focusing its recruiting activities on areas where it’s seeing high customer demand, Ballantyne added, including software development and IT consulting as well as the Toronto-based IBM.com call centre which handles direct sales, customer service and technical support for Canada and the U.S.
AN EMERGING TREND
While an upswing does appear to be emerging, some people remain cautious about labelling it a trend at this point.
“We did see some upswing in October, but I wouldn’t call it a trend as of yet,” said Jennifer Lee Thomas, senior director of communications at Monster.ca, another leading Canadian career site. “What we’ve seen of the tech sector is that it’s relatively stable. It hasn’t declined, but we have seen flatness.”
According to a Media Metrix Report, Monster.ca set a new Canadian job site record by attracting 2.2 million visitors in September 2003. According to Thomas, Monster.ca’s job postings grew by 7.8 per cent overall in 2003.
However, she said that growth did not spread very generously to the site’s tech-related postings, which increased by only 3.4 per cent, much below the overall growth rate and also less than 2002’s tech postings growth of 5.8 per cent.
But Christopher Drummond, director of marketing at CNC Global, a Canadian tech-staffing firm with offices across the country, said many companies aren’t using job boards to advertise their openings. “Job boards are not that successful—it depends on what you’re looking for. They can be very frustrating because they tend to make the haystack bigger, without making it any easier to find the needle,” he said. “There also is a movement, particularly among larger firms, to try and do what they do in a more efficient way, and they’re turning to firms like us, not just to help them find a few people, but very often to help them find large teams of people.”
CNC experienced more demand for IT professionals across the board in 2003.
“We saw a 30 per cent increase quarter over quarter in the demand,” Drummond said. “And the demand has been for everything from technicians and people at the lower end, all the way up to project managers, business systems analysts and people along those lines.
“We do hear in the market right now that this is going to continue and people are going to be starting up new projects in the coming year and they’ll need to be ramping up more people.”
GROWTH, NOT BOOM
Marcelle Chamberland, the marketing projects manager at the Canadian Technology Human Resources Board (CTHRB), has noticed the growth in the sector but said there’s a key difference between this upswing and the last boom. “What I see happening is that it’s starting with a slow movement.
It’s nothing like what it was two or three years ago, but it’s picking up. And I think it’s better that way. It’s a slow recovery instead of a big swing up and then a crash down.”
The CTHRB represents the interests of various partners in the technology workforce and has recently launched an internship program for new grads in the tech sector to encourage the development of meaningful work experience. Employers receive up to $12,500 in pay subsidies to hire participants and must offer a minimum of 30 hours per week for six to 12 months. “Hopefully at the end of the work placement the employer will retain the service of the new grad they hired,” Chamberland said.
At the other end of the spectrum, Keith Powell, the former CIO of Nortel Networks, has just launched the new IT Leadership Development program at Ryerson University in Toronto in order to prepare near-senior-level tech talent for potential growth opportunities.
“I think we’re in the very early stages of an upswing,” he said. “But what we’re seeing is more and more business people are being recruited into the CIO role and that has created a glass ceiling for the bright people in IT that traditionally have been the successors to the CIO.”
The program offers three one-week modules focusing on bringing a business perspective to the IT world. “We talk about service, customer focus and some of the politics that an IT professional in a CIO role needs to be able to understand and deal with,” Powell said. “The main thing I’m hoping is that these bright people in IT start to get considered for the CIO succession plan.”
GRABBING CERTIFICATION
For those either starting their tech careers or looking to advance them, Workopolis’s Hayes recommends getting certified.
“There’s a real increase in focus toward industry-certified professionals,” she said. “Now you find employers want Microsoft-certified professionals or
Oracle developers or PeopleSoft programmers.
Employers are looking for much more specific things in their hiring.”
Twenty-one-year-old Ryan Clark is working on his Cisco Certified Network Associate certification, and that helped him land his first job at the Internet Marketing Center in Vancouver. “I ended up getting to know a guy I met through my Cisco course,” Clark said. “I had just graduated (from high school) but ended up giving him a résumé and within a month or two he gave me a job offer. Certification is definitely a big plus, especially if you don’t have any post-secondary schooling. And once you’re in a job, it can help you get some seniority and a pay raise.”
According to the Canadian Council of Technicians and Technologists, “certified members enjoy lucrative, challenging and rewarding careers in a wide variety of industries,” said Neil Johnson, president, in a press release in September announcing the results of a 2002 survey undertaken by EKOS Research Associates and funded by Human Resources Development Canada.
“What’s more,” Johnson continued, “the survey confirms that certified technicians and technologists are highly trained and dedicated professionals, and are truly the backbone of Canadian industry.”
BACK TO BUSINESS
Powell also believes all techies could benefit from developing a greater awareness of the business environment within which they operate. “The main thing
I’m hoping is that they start to think about what they can offer the business,” he said. “When companies are figuring out how they can create value for their customers they can’t do that without taking info tech into account. The challenge is to figure out how to make it a competitive advantage.”
Devlin agreed: “Part of what I learned with the e-business program was how to relate technology to executives,” he said.
“You have to be able to talk it on both sides — tech side and business side.”
Web work
Cdn. Council of Technicians and Technologists http://www.cctt.ca
Canadian Technology Human Resources Board http://www.cthrb.ca
CNC Global http://www.cncglobal.com
IBM Canada Jobs Page http://www.can.ibm.com/hr
Monster.ca http://www.monster.ca
Ryerson IT Leadership Development Program http://www.ryerson.ca/itm/ryecio.htm
Workopolis http://www.workopolis.com
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