Why is it so hard to find tech skills?

Canada will need about a quarter of a million new tech workers by 2025, according to a recent report — and this is presenting many challenges for employers.

“Ultimately, there still is a pretty big shortage of skilled workers. The demand for technology workers or digital economy workers remains significant,” says Alexandra Cutean, chief research officer at Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) in Vancouver.

But where exactly are the biggest shortages?

“Where we’re seeing a lot of this accelerated demand really is from the traditional technology sector but also from other sectors, including the public sector — they’re trying to leverage technology to build in efficiencies or grow the business,” she says.

“It’s just a very broad base of demand.”

The ICTC report heard from 400 businesses about hiring challenges and predicts the number of jobs in the digital economy in Canada will reach 2.26 million by 2025.

Global competition for tech skills

Right now, there are over 48,000 vacant tech positions, and over 5,000 in cyber, “which is the hottest topic within all of that — and those are only vacant positions that are reported,” says Angela Mondou, president and CEO of TECHNATION, a tech industry association in Mississauga, Ont.

Mondou is referring to the organization’s labour market intelligence platform that “scrapes” across data in Canada that portrays jobs and skills being sought after in real time.

However, organizations in Canada are finding multiple challenges in filling these digital worker needs, according to Mondou.

“I used to run a predictive analytics company in Kitchener-Waterloo and Google was across the street. When it came to getting data scientists, I was competing against significant salary differences and I had to appeal to people’s personal desire and what space they wanted to work in.

“You’re dealing with global competition, you’re dealing with remote: the ability for somebody to sit continents away and pick and choose where they might work.”

Digital transformation heightens competition

With digital transformation hitting all aspects of the economy, the need for skilled IT workers will only grow, says Cutean.

“There’s competition from what you can call ‘pure-play’ technology companies or just companies that really are in the IT sector, and then there’s just competition also from other sectors that maybe traditionally haven’t leveraged technology but now are looking to do so — especially if we’re looking at broader macroeconomic forces that may happen in the near future.”

“Of course, companies want to figure out: ‘How can I build in some efficiencies?’ and technology is a way to do that so certainly there’s heightened competition. I think there’s a constant challenge in this space,” she says.

Another study done by ICTC showed that even during the pandemic, from February 2020 through to December 2022, employment in the digital sector grew by 20%.

A recent Statistics Canada report found that the country’s labour shortage might not be as bad as many thought it was.

Look to internal candidates for tech skills

So what should organizations do to improve their level of digital knowledge? Upskilling is one of the best ways this can be accomplished, says Mondou.

“There are phenomenal opportunities for Canadians out there who are looking at upgrading or upskilling because the government, with the support of industry, has funding and some really important and much needed programming to balance out that transformation as we move to digitalization,” she says.

It’s also key to realize that workers must embark on a “continual skilling journey,” says Cutean, in order to succeed.

“The days of completing a Bachelor degree and not really taking additional training after that are probably over and employers do increasingly expect that workers are upskilling themselves; learning new competencies, and really staying abreast with what’s required in the economy.”

Recently, Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED) awarded $250 million to Palette Skills, a non-profit learning organization, to help it upskill 15,000 workers over a three-year period.

Soft skills versus tech skills

And it’s not only the technical skills that are in great demand as increasingly soft skills are being requested by employers.

“One thing that we are seeing more and more is, in addition to the technical requirements of the jobs employers are valuing, you can refer to them as human skills, if you want but those additional fields that really complement those,” says Cutean.

“How do people work in teams? How do they manage conflict? How are they in negotiations or mediation working across teams? Increasingly, we are seeing through our surveys that employers are placing a fairly high emphasis on those skills. They do tend to rank them as mandatory or very important — sometimes even more so than the technical skills.”

The rapid pace of change in organizations means that non-tech skills are being valued by employers, says Mondou.

“We’re all moving at warp speed, and you need people that can think fast, can have critical thinking and some of those skills are tough to train. One of the top skills is problem solving, creativity and the ability to be self-driven or self-initiated makes a lot of sense. Those are the kinds of things that I pay attention to because it’s important to balance what we need in terms of skills.”