"For the sake of our children, invest in digital talent now"/ "Foreign tech workers help to fill skills gap in Canadian sector"

Jun. 1, 2018 "For the sake of our children, invest in digital talent now": Today I found this article by Kevin Peekser in the Globe and Mail:

President, Microsoft Canada.

Canada’s digital economy is growing at an unprecedented rate and rapidly outpacing growth in our skilled digital work force. As the president of a technology company, this is hugely concerning to me. My role is to help our Canadian customers use innovative technology to enhance their competitiveness, but the reality is it doesn’t matter how advanced the tools are if our customers do not have the technical talent to use them.

These concerns are not mine alone. When I speak with other talented women and men leading Canada’s tech sector, they voice the same anxieties. We talk often about the “digital skills gap” – projected by the Information and Communications Technology Council to result in more than 200,000 unfilled jobs by 2020 – and the need to invest in Canada’s digital work force for the most in-demand skills. 

We have an immediate need in the most cutting-edge technologies, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), mixed reality and the area that holds the most promise to me, artificial intelligence (AI).

By 2019, market intelligence provider IDC estimates that 40 per cent of digital transformation initiatives will use AI and 75 per cent of enterprise applications will use AI by 2021.

Several of the world’s leading AI academics call Canada home, and yet the vast majority of Canadian businesses are not ready to capitalize on this advantage. As technology leaders, we are hyper aware of the technology tsunami that will affect every industry and government sector. 

Human nature unfortunately loves the status quo, but technological advancement is not patient or polite. If Canada does not invest in the training and development needed to thrive, it will be left behind.

McKinsey & Co. recently launched a study on Canada’s readiness for AI-driven disruption, and the results are startling. They found that while 89 per cent of Canadian business leaders believe AI will create major positive change in three to five years, only 34 per cent have adjusted their long-term strategies to take advantage of AI’s potential benefits. 

Further, they found the basics of AI are not widely understood and current AI applications are not transformative – Canadian businesses are just scratching the surface of what’s possible with AI. All of this points to the same fundamental problem: a talent pool that is not fully prepared to take advantage of opportunities that are available today.

These are big challenges that require big thinking: How can we develop the skills of our existing IT talent to meet the most in-demand jobs? In our digital world, every IT professional needs to be engaged, curious and continually learning to keep pace with the evolving landscape. 

This includes me. It includes my leadership team and it includes every person in my organization. I’ve made it a priority to continue training to ensure my vision for the future stays relevant and capitalizes on economic opportunity. 

I have deliberately built digital skilling into the performance expectations for each of my leaders. We have invested in training to support the skills capability of our partner network, education leaders and provincial and federal government team members, because it is the right (and necessary) thing to do.

To help others do the same, Microsoft Canada is investing more than $2-million this year in programs, courses, OpenHacks and resources to help developers and data scientists update their skills and get hands-on training. We recently announced the Microsoft Professional Program for Artificial Intelligence, a program that teaches aspiring AI engineers the skills needed to build deep-learning models for AI solutions.

 We are also investing in companies such as Element AI, an applied-research lab that is helping Canadian businesses transform with AI and machine learning. 

We are only at the beginning of a tech-skills shortage. Canada’s tech industry must work closely with academia and policy makers to ensure that Canadian tech talent can compete on a global scale. And if we’re really committed to securing Canada’s digital future, we must think beyond the next five years and train tomorrow’s work force.

I am a father. I’ve coached baseball and hockey for girls’ and boys’ teams. The optimism of youth is infectious. I think a lot about what the future will hold for my children. I joined Microsoft nine months ago; before that, I worked at the same technology company for a decade and a half in a progression of roles and responsibilities.

 I know this will not be the reality for my children. In fact, it is likely my kids will have job titles that don’t exist yet. Ensuring my kids and the children of Canada are set up for success in a globalized world is clearly just as important as the work I’m doing to help our customers thrive.

Being engaged with the ubiquitous nature of technology, learning to code, infusing creativity and augmenting human ingenuity with the power of computers are important steps that students can take to prepare for – and benefit from – Canada’s digital economy.

As the father of a daughter, it is important to me that we engage all Canadians when it comes to utilizing the tools for success in the digital economy. In the past year alone, through the work of our partners, we’ve reached more than 56,000 young people in Canada; of these young people, 50 per cent are girls and 80 per cent are underserved and Indigenous youth. 

We recently hosted students from the FIRST Robotics program at our headquarters in Mississauga, Ont., for YouthSpark Live – a day of coding, inspiration and career planning led by Microsoft staff and FIRST Robotics community leaders. The FIRST Robotics program inspires young people to be science and technology leaders and innovators, and is just one organization that we partner with, along with Canada Learning Code, Kids Code Jeunesse and Actua – to introduce STEM skills to young people across Canada.

We have the right talent here in Canada right now. We have an obligation as technology leaders to equip young Canadians and STEM professionals with an evolving set of digital skills. Ultimately, if we embrace this changing economy, we will lead the innovation revolution and I believe we can solve some of the world’s biggest challenges.

To learn more about teaching STEM skills to young people, visit firstroboticscanada.org.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/leadership/article-for-the-sake-of-our-kids-invest-in-tech-talent-now/

6 hours ago

75% of recent graduates of computer engineering in Canada left the country. Why? Because Canadian tech companies pay half what American tech companies do, and are not interested in new graduates they have to train. How can they get away with that? Simple. They advertise a job at half what the US will pay, demand 5-10 years experience, and when they don't get any replies go to Justin Trudeau and whine about a shortage of tech workers. And Justin says "Well no problem, boys! Just give me a nice donation and I'll let you bring in temporary foreign workers!'

"Foreign tech workers help to fill skills gap in Canadian sector": Today I found this article by Jared Lindzon in the Globe and Mail:

The booming Canadian technology industry is outpacing the country’s ability to fill in talent gaps, causing employers to look beyond the nation’s borders for high-tech hires. 

While STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers are enjoying the fastest growth rate in Canada – with demand increasing by 4.6 per cent each year compared to 1.8 per cent in the job market as a whole – less than a quarter of postsecondary graduates are from STEM fields, according to the latest censuses. 

As a result, the sector is expecting a skills shortage of approximately 220,000 by 2020.

“The jobs are here, and they’re waiting for Canadians to fill them, and Canadians aren’t jumping on them for whatever reason,” said Manu Varma, vice-president of human resources for Vancouver-based professional services consultancy Traction on Demand.

In order to help fill that talent gap, Mr. Varma says that nine of the company’s 355 staff members were recruited and hired from abroad.

Four were processed through the Global Talent Stream visa program, which launched in June, 2017, and five through VanHack, a Vancouver-based organization that seeks to assist tech workers and employers with cross-border hiring. 

VanHack recently hosted an event in Toronto in partnership with the MaRS Discovery District, inviting Toronto-based tech industry employers to mingle with a pool of international candidates. 

“We’ve helped 454 people get hired in the last three years, and most of those have been in Canada, about 300, and the rest in Europe,” said VanHack chief executive and founder, Ilya Brotzky. 

While living in Brazil, the Soviet-born entrepreneur, who has also lived in Israel, Canada and the United States, began a career-training program for others looking to immigrate to the country. 

“There wasn’t much demand, and all my Brazilian friends said, ‘Ilya, you should do this the other way around, there’s a lot of Brazilians that want to move to Canada,’ so I just followed the demand,” he said. 

Since its founding three years ago, Mr. Brotzky says VanHack has seen interest in Canada as a destination for foreign technology workers skyrocket. “It’s an interesting time now for Canada, which is why I moved back,” he said. 

With a booming domestic technology industry, Mr. Brotzky says demand for talent in Canada is increasing, and the new Global Talent Stream visa is allowing highly skilled workers to immigrate more quickly and seamlessly than ever before.

“The H1B visa program [in the United States] takes too much time. Everybody knows that now,” he said. “If you get a job offer here, you can be in Canada in less than two months.”

The contrast between the two North American countries’ approaches to foreign talent is not lost on tech workers from abroad looking to relocate.

“I want a place that wants me, and wants me to feel part of the community,” said Thiago Santos, a full stack developer originally from Brazil and currently employed at the Cleveland Clinic in Abu Dhabi. “I’m here to bring value, and I don’t want to be begging for a permanent residence visa in order to show what I can do.”

After 17 years working on four different continents in the technology industry, Mr. Santos arrived at VanHack’s Toronto event aiming to connect with startups interested in his talents. While he’s proud of the work he’s accomplished in Abu Dhabi, Mr. Santos says he wants to raise his two daughters in a more open and equal society.

While the United States, and specifically Silicon Valley, was once the top target for global tech talent, Mr. Santos says recent political events and nativist sentiments have had an impact on the country’s brand internationally. “I don’t think the U.S. is even an option any more,” he said. “Even if they did want me, I don’t think I would live in a place like that.”

That sentiment was shared by fellow Brazilian candidate Michel Traub, who says he became interested in Canada after seeing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau marching in Toronto’s Pride Parade. “I thought this looks like a great environment to live and work,” he said. “Silicon Valley is a place that everybody seems to be fighting each other, and in Canada it seems everybody is helping each other.”

Although the Global Talent Stream visa has made the process of bringing in foreign talent easier for tech industry employers, successfully bringing these people on board is still more complex than it would be for a local hire.

“I think that it’s really critical to have one-on-ones for the first two months, checking in every single week with a designated co-worker to see how things are going,” said Caitlin MacGregor, the CEO and co-founder of Plum, a Waterloo, Ont.-based employee and candidate assessment company. “Getting a permanent place is tricky, so it’s good to have a clean, safe, affordable option where they can stay for the first month.”

Two of her employees, both senior developers, were sourced through VanHack. Ms. MacGregor says she turned to the service upon realizing how difficult it was to hire for senior technology positions in the domestic market alone.

“Companies are working really hard to retain their talent, so when you post a job there are just not enough people at the level that you need applying,” she said, adding that training existing staff for senior roles isn’t a realistic option for small companies such as hers. “Bringing in foreign talent allows you to finally have a big enough pool of applicants.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/career-advice/article-foreign-tech-workers-coming-to-canada-to-fill-talent-gap/

"How some organizations aim to go beyond going paperless"/ "The pros and cons of bootstrapping your company"

Apr. 20, 2018 "How some organizations aim to go beyond going paperless": Today I found this article by Guy Dixon in the Globe and Mail:

Lowly recycling bins sit next to the office cubicles. At our desks, we drink from ceramic coffee mugs. No Styrofoam except for the foam casings inside our bike helmets, used when the weather improves, as a way we try to reduce carbon use by going without a car.

It all feels like such small measures.

Sometimes, the environmental impact of our working lives can seem so outside our personal control. It’s easy to get complacent, even self-congratulatory (“we’ve gone paperless!” – even if the power and ventilation to keep those office computers running is hardly environmentally friendly).

So, with Earth Day around the corner, how can offices continue to improve sustainably? And what can employees do to make more of a improvement?

For Frances Edmonds, head of sustainability at computer maker HP Canada, it comes down to finding ways for employees to feel engaged in the process. “An engaged employee is a more profitable employee,” she said, “so the opportunity is to engage your employees on sustainability practices that they, for the most part, will love … It will also save you money in the long run.”

Of course, there are myriad things one can do: turning off all electronics, turning off all the lights, printing next to nothing, recycling, making sure that the equipment you have gets used to its fullest (or if the equipment will only serve a limited function, to rent it or buy whatever function it performs from a third party).

HP Canada has worked with the conservation group World Wildlife Fund Canada on Living Planet @ Work, an outreach initiative that catalogues environmental initiatives that employees can undertake, even ideas for outings such as shoreline cleanups that can also be a team-building exercise for co-workers. 

Employee engagement in sustainable programs is seen as key. It can actually attract the best employees in the first place.

At the WWF office in Toronto, a little friendly shaming goes on. Not turning off your computer for the night, or producing too much garbage, or not turning off the lights get noticed and commented on, as one WWF employee noted. It’s meant in fun.

“It actually comes down to trying to provide a better work environment for employees,” said David Photiadis, a director in the Toronto office of the sustainability consulting firm the Delphi Group. Amid a backdrop of concern for the planet, environmental initiatives in the office are fundamentally there “to motivate employees and increase productivity,” and “if you’re trying to be a good business leader, motivating your employees is one of the best places to go,” he added.

Yet, if environmental initiatives have so many benefits, “why aren’t more people doing it? I think it’s a lack of knowledge of the opportunities here,” Ms. Edmonds said. Most people recycle out of habit, but may not have a full grasp of larger practices, such as sustainable procurement (buying goods or services from suppliers in ways that emphasize the longevity of the product and its carbon costs).

“Actually one of the fastest ways to green your business is to purchase from a company that is already green,” Ms. Edmonds said.

“If we take the example of IT [information technology], you can choose to buy a product that was built with a low carbon impact, that can be used with a low carbon impact, and then taken, potentially recycled and put back into the same products again – decreasing the footprint of that activity,” she said.

Sustainability experts frequently talk about the circular economy, basically an effort to keep a finished good from ending up in a landfill, and the product instead being recycled, after its usefulness has run dry, into a new product.

“It drives you back to thinking about whether I buy this as a good, or do I buy it as a service? How am I going to operate this thing once it’s in my building? Those protocols of ownership need to be considered,” Ms. Edmonds said.

“The easiest way to think about this is vehicle purchasing. A lot of organizations buy vehicles, but then to operate that vehicle, the fuel consumption is a big cost of operating that vehicle. If you’re not thinking about that when you buy the vehicle, you end up having problems long term,” she said.

This is a more holistic approach to all the environmental costs. Even the smallest measures, such as buying less paper for the printer, become part of a more conscious approach to all costs and change the workplace culture – even the kind of office buildings a company chooses. It affects the priorities an office may place on waste diversion or better energy conservation.

“Certainly the larger developers are implementing sustainability as their normal course of action now,” said Tina Sutton, project manager at Green Reason, a sustainable building consultancy in Toronto. “ Some of the smaller ones are still paying lip service to it. They’re doing better than 10 or 15 years ago, but they’re still not completely embracing the whole thing.” 

“On a wider scale, commercial buildings are going need to start reporting on their energy measures, but there’s this huge gap in terms of smaller buildings,” she said. “Obviously there are lots of people [and companies] that need space, and they can’t pay that much. So, they end up locating into these buildings where the sustainability measures are extremely limited or non-existent.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/careers/article-how-offices-can-do-more-to-improve-sustainability/

May 28, 2018 "The pros and cons of bootstrapping your company": Today I found this article by Camilla Cornell in the Globe and Mail:

For the first five years, Alyssa Furtado ran personal-finance website Ratehub Inc. out of her home. Being able to dispense with outside office space kept costs down, but it meant at one point there were 13 people working out of her basement. The seven-year-old next door saw them all piling out for lunch one day, she recalls. “Wow, miss,” he told her. “You sure live with a lot of people.”

Ms. Furtado didn’t initially consider pursuing funding to get her website off the ground “mostly out of naiveté.” She wasn’t from a tech background and she wasn’t familiar with venture capital. “I didn’t know any better,” she says.

But although she believes self-funding her business contributed to its long-term success, as Ms. Furtado and her fellow panelists at The Globe and Mail Small Business Summit pointed out, there are pros and cons to “bootstrapping.”

The Pros

You stay lean and mean. For Ms. Furtado, perhaps the primary benefit of self-funding, at least in the early stages, is “it really forces you to lay a good foundation for your business. You have to get smart about acquiring customers and managing your expenses.”

She became accomplished at applying for government grants and loans, for example, and she used an inexpensive outsourced contractor to help her build the first website. A side benefit of using outsourced labour, she says: “You get to try out potential employees.”

Ms. Furtado also found ways to build her brand free of charge. “We tried to piggyback on media stories,” she says. “If there was a Bank of Canada rate hike, we would run calculations for journalists to break down what that meant for the average Canadians and how it would impact their payments.”

Panelist Steve Hubbard, founding partner with Lightenco, says he and his partners also self-funded their Ottawa-based, sustainable-lighting-solutions company. Although it launched in 2011, “we didn’t have a marketing budget until last year,” he says.

Instead, he and his partner employed “ninja marketing,” strategically targeting well-known local businesses and using their endorsement to help spread the word. “We looked for the ice cream shop everyone goes to and the restaurant everyone knows,” Mr. Hubbard says. “We got some brands behind us and built on referrals.”

He also used shared business space to cut down on costs and make connections, and reached out to organizations such as Futurpreneur for mentorship and advice to help Lightenco grow.

You’re indisputably in charge. When you self-fund, says Bryan Watson, partner with Toronto-based consulting and venture-services firm Flow Ventures, “you are master of your own destiny. You have the freedom to move dextrously and build the business your way.”

Ms. Furtado recalls sitting down with an adviser at one point who was pushing her to tackle e-mail marketing and Facebook, among other areas. “But we were really focused on making sure we were top ranked on Google when people searched for ‘personal finance,’ ” she says. “We were two people at the time and I thought to myself, ‘That is actually the wrong advice. All we can do is nail one thing and become the best at it.’ ”

The good news: She had no obligation to listen to that outside advice. If he had owned a good chunk of her company, she might not have had a choice. Once you persuade people to invest in your company, Mr. Watson says, “you are a steward of their money, so you don’t have as much control.”

The cons

You don’t get the benefit of mentors with skin in the game. Taking on an investor can actually be a “perk,” Mr. Watson contends. They should bring with them valuable input and connections, along with the capital you need. “But it is a relationship, so you have to look for the right fit for your company,” he says. “And you should really take your time trying to figure that out.”

You’re forced to take on added risk. “Our initial investment was basically one order of product from overseas that may or may not have shown up,” Mr. Hubbard says. “It was a bit risky.” 

Entrepreneurs who go the bootstrapping route tend to plow most of their companies’ earnings back into the business, meaning their entire financial fortune is tied up in their company. At some point, they often want to derisk − selling a stake to an outside investor can allow the founder to diversify their holdings.

You may not grow as fast. RateHub recently raised its first round of formal capital after seven years of bootstrapping. The reason? “We stumbled on insurance comparisons and we knew it could be a multimillion-dollar business,” Ms. Furtado says. “But we had zero excess capacity.”

If capital is truly restraining you from scaling up, then getting outside investment makes total sense, she says. And if you have a proven business model and “a good story to tell investors,” you’re in a better position to negotiate a deal.

“One of the benefits of waiting to raise capital is that we were able to retain a significant majority of the company,” Ms. Furtado concludes. “When you’ve been successful at building the company, your investors want you to run the company – they buy into your vision.”

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/small-business/money/article-the-pros-and-cons-of-bootstrapping-your-company/