the CanadaVisa Team - 22 May, 2007
According to a recent study by consulting firm Deloitte and Touche LLP, many North American CEO’s are having trouble finding IT workers and are looking to foreign skilled workers to staff their organizations.
Nearly two thirds of the 125 American and Canadian CEO’s polled “felt it was important to look overseas” to locate IT professionals. Though the majority of them feel that qualified IT talent is being turned out by the North American education system, there are not enough IT graduates being produced in North America to meet the increasing demand. “According to one study, U.S. schools produce 30,000 engineers a year, while China turns out 700,000 engineers yearly. How can we keep our edge [in the IT market] with such an enormous disparity?” asks Adam Cole, national director for the Canadian Information Processing Society.
Nearly half of the executives polled cited attracting and retaining qualified IT employees as their most significant operational challenges.
To respond to this demand for foreign IT workers, the Canadian government developed a pilot project to facilitate the entry of workers in the software sector on a temporary basis. Under normal circumstances, an individual from abroad who wishes to work in Canada must have a validated job offer from Human Resources and Social Development Canada (ESDC) with job-specific confirmation that no Canadian citizens or Permanent Residents can be found to fill the job. The pilot project was created to skip this step. Because ESDC has already seen evidence that Canadian companies have been unable to staff certain IT occupations, it has issued a national confirmation letter for job offers in these occupations to replace job-specific ones. The national confirmation letter eliminates the delay associated with the job-specific confirmation process.
To qualify for the expedited process, the IT job offer must fit within one of the specific job descriptions and the applicant must meet the minimum requirements for education, language, and experience for the position.
An evaluation of the pilot project for Information Technology workers thus far shows that the project has contributed to alleviating IT skills shortages in Canada and has also encouraged a skill transfer from foreign workers to existing staff.
