TORONTO — Three years ago, Erik Dohnberg was working at the Genius Bar at an Apple store in London, Ont.
He'd been there for 10 months after graduating with an information and media studies degree from Western University when he decided he wanted more.
With the intention of starting up his own business, Dohnberg signed up for a nine-week boot camp at Bitmaker Labs, a web developer training school in Toronto.
Within two weeks of completing the boot camp, Dohnberg had 16 job interviews and received two job offers. One of them was from Bitmaker Labs.
Dohnberg said he doesn't regret going to university, but also doesn't think it prepared him to get a real job. Most of his classmates went on to graduate studies.
"It was education for the sake of more education," said Dohnberg, now an admissions manager at Bitmaker.
"I can write a hell of an essay on Star Trek and Star Wars fan fiction but really, that's irrelevant to practical skills. I'm a good writer but that's about it."
Tech skills programs like the ones at Bitmaker Labs have been sprouting up over the past few years in response to a tech talent shortage in Canada. It's a problem that has been bubbling to the surface, as more startups open up shop and try to recruit from an already-small pool of Canadian coders and developers.
A report released earlier this month by the Information and Communications Technology Council estimates that 218,000 tech jobs will be created in Canada by 2020. It warns that it could cost the economy billions of dollars in lost productivity, tax revenues and GDP if Canada doesn't address the tech skills gap.
"It is imperative that this challenge is tackled, especially if Canada wants to secure its place as a competitive leader in the global economy," the 57-page report says.
At Bitmaker, courses range from weekend boot camps to an intensive nine-week course for $9,000. The school believes anyone can learn how to code and its students include everyone from college and university dropouts to ex-engineers, investment bankers and skilled labourers. Bitmaker has also enrolled computer engineer and science graduates looking to update their skills.
Dohnberg said such boot camps are still not producing workers fast enough to meet the demands of the ever-evolving tech industry, making it vital for colleges and universities to tailor their programs for jobs in the sector.
"(Universities) are not focused on education. They're focused on grades and a piece of paper at the end, because for decades, that has been the way you get a job and open up new opportunities," he said.
"Now that's not enough. Universities need to start understanding how people actually learn and come up with innovative ways to imparting education to those people."
Vancouver-based Lighthouse Labs, which also runs web developer boot camps, sees its role as completely separate from that of a post-secondary institution.
"We consider ourselves complementary to university. We're not trying to undercut it or disrupt it," said Jeremy Shaki, Lighthouse chief executive and self-proclaimed "chief talking officer."
"The challenge is this industry changes pretty quickly, and the way universities are set up — they're not meant to reflect the industry needs at their current state. They're meant to provide a deeper learning so people have a solid academic experience."
The eight-week boot camp at Lighthouse accepts one out of three applicants, with the deciding factor being motivation, a coding background and a willingness to do hard work.
"We don't take people who are in it for the gold rush," said Shaki.
The tech industry is also struggling to keep workers in Canada, something he says is due to a lack of culture here for developers and coders, which makes it easier for them to be lured to hot spots like Silicon Valley and New York where salaries are higher.
Shaki estimates that a starting salary for a web developer in Toronto would be around $46,000, whereas in San Francisco, the average beginning salary is about $90,000.
Langis Roy, dean of graduate studies at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ont., says post-secondary institutions are aware that they need to adapt to a more technological world because that's where the jobs are. That includes everything from providing students with training on professional software, encouraging entrepreneurship and setting up tech incubators.
"We need to serve the industry and market-driven needs," said Roy.
TECH TALENT SHORTAGE MEANS POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION NO LONGER REQUIRED
TORONTO — Before Hired launched in Toronto last November, nearly 27,000 people and more than 280 companies applied for the online service that matches job seekers with gigs in the tech sector.
About five per cent of applicants are approved to use Hired's services, and it usually charges firms 15 per cent of a new employee's first-year salary for each successful hire.
To Matt Mickiewicz, the company's co-founder and chief product officer, the high interest signals a problem — the jobs are there, but there are too few qualified candidates to fill them.
"There is a huge talent shortage within Canada," said Mickiewicz. The company plans to expand its Canadian operations to either Vancouver or Montreal this year, where he says the situation is similar.
Canada's tech companies are in stiff competition for retaining top prospects. There won't be enough qualified people to fill more than 218,000 new information and communications technology jobs in the country by 2020, according to a report published by the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) earlier this month.
That may be years away, but organizations already struggle to find qualified applicants.
One of the top challenges for many is attracting and recruiting employees, according to an ICTC survey where more than 53 per cent of respondents identified it as a problem.
It's an issue Shopify, an Ottawa-based company that helps other businesses build their e-commerce presence, has encountered.
"In looking for folks who are going to raise the bar, absolutely, there are challenges," said Anna Lambert, Shopify's director of talent acquisition.
Tech companies must have an expansive recruitment strategy to bring in the best employees, she said.
There are traditional avenues like on-campus recruitment. But Shopify also sponsors events abroad, partners with organizations that teach coding and attends niche conferences.
A prospective employee's education level isn't necessarily a deal-breaker.
"There are some roles where the top candidate will have a master's or a PhD, but there are lots of candidates who don't," Lambert said.
Sometimes, Shopify attracts students midway through their studies through its year-round internship program and they decide against resuming their education because they enjoy the significant impact they're making at the company, she said.
Harrison Brundage, 25, quit his software engineering program at McGill University more than halfway toward earning his bachelor's degree. He had just completed a four-month software developer internship at Shopify and opted to join the growing startup instead of returning to school.
He asked for a yearlong, full-time position, intending to return to school afterwards. Twelve months turned into nearly five years, and Brundage is now Shopify's director of engineering for data platforms.
The skills needed to be a successful software developer change very rapidly, he said.
"This makes it remarkably hard to teach modern, relevant software development practice. There are many techniques that will be obsolete by the time a curriculum for them is finalized, taught and used by its graduates," said Brundage in an email.
While he learned some very useful skills at school, Brundage said he found his on-the-job experience at Shopify helped him grow more, so he chose to stay put.
That probably happens with some of the University of Waterloo's students, said Rocco Fondacaro, the school's director of student and faculty relations for the co-op education and career action department.
The school doesn't track how many computer science and computer engineering students abandon their studies and turn co-op placements into full-time jobs. But Fondacaro says it's likely rare since the university does a good job of convincing students their degree is more than just a piece of paper to frame and hang on a wall.
"There's a lot of additional learning that will serve them well through their entire life," said Fondacaro, citing co-op opportunities and professional development courses.
As for Brundage, he doesn't plan to re-enroll, saying his Shopify experience and references will likely qualify him for other future opportunities.
"I run a group of world-class engineers building world-class systems," he said.
