New Brunswick is developing itself as a centre for high tech. But a lack of talent is holding it back

Last week I posed the same question to two players in the New Brunswick tech industry and got identical answers.

Here’s what I asked Barbara Ells of Tech South East and Larry Sampson of the New Brunswick Information Technology Council: What’s the biggest issue facing the tech segment in the province? Their answer: talent, or the lack thereof.

“Talent is mainly an issue on the IT side, but IT marketing skills are also in short supply and high demand,” says Ells, the manager of programs and member relations for the Moncton-based tech enabling organization.

Sampson, the CEO of the IT council, agrees. If there’s one thing the sector needs, he believes it’s talented people who can develop ideas and turn them into growing businesses. “If you’ve got superior supply and superior quality of talent, they’ll generate superior ideas,”’ he says. “And if you get superior ideas, you will in time attract capital.”

New Brunswick Premier David Alward’s Advisory Council on Technology recently asked the council to prepare a report on the province’s IT sector with a view of formulating policy to help grow the industry. The 24-page report, entitled Growing the ICT Sector, was published the first week of November and makes a range of recommendations designed to increase the talent pool of and channel capital into the IT industry. Although it relates specifically to New Brunswick, the report captures the IT challenges and opportunities common to all Atlantic provinces.

“New Brunswick as an economy is not leveraging ICT to its fullest,” states the report. “Our exports of ICT goods are less than one-third the national average, and the sector represents less than 4% of the provincial GDP, a full 25% lower than nationally. Paradoxically, what this fundamentally represents is an opportunity.”

You can adjust the numbers as needed, but the message remains the same for the entire region: We don’t have a large enough IT sector, and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that we have too little R&D, too few people, and too little investment capital. This is a problem because IT offers huge opportunities for growth.

Even though Canada doesn’t perform as well as its OECD peers, the Canadian IT sector nevertheless grows at twice the rate of the country’s overall economy, largely because it offers such strong export potential. The benefits of a strong IT sector also radiate through the entire economy, because it usually improves the productivity of other industries, buttressing competitiveness and creating jobs.

To grow this essential economic sector, the Information Technology Council urges government, industry, and academia to work together to plan growth. It also wants reforms that would channel more money into R&D and young businesses, such as increasing the maximum Equity Tax Credit from 30% of the investment to 50%.

The council has concrete long- and short-term solutions for the lack of qualified IT professionals, including the retraining of those laid off in other industries and increasing the number of secondary and post-secondary students studying IT. And of course it says that we should try to retain the grads we do produce.

“The fundamental challenge facing New Brunswick in this regard is one of inadequate supply, caused by low graduation rates from ICT-related degree and diploma programs, high levels of emigration, and low levels of immigration and attraction,” states the report. “While the ICT jobs here pay in the order of 28% more than the average job in New Brunswick, what will catch the eye of a student graduating from university, prospective immigrants, or workers from the rest of Canada is that they pay 20% less than the Canadian average.”

Sampson agrees that repopulating the IT talent pool will take time. His council’s report makes some valuable recommendations on how to get the ball rolling.

Peter Moreira is the principal of entrevestor.com, a website with news and analysis on investment and entrepreneurship in Atlantic Canada.