From Oil Patch To IT: ICTC Seeks To Upskill Mid-Career Professionals
HALIFAX — A program from The Information and Communications Technology Council, (ICTC) hopes to help connect IT firms with those who have the unique experience required for thousands of available openings across Canada’s tech sector, including several hundred vacancies here in the Atlantic region.
ICTC’s WIL Digital (Work Integrated Learning program) helps employers grow their businesses by providing wage subsidies for hiring post-secondary students and provides 50 percent of the student’s salary up to $5,000, or 70 percent up to $7,000 for underrepresented students.
Through a recent pilot program offered in Alberta, those wage subsidies are now being offered to employers who hire mid-career professionals who are transitioning from a career in the oil and gas sector in Alberta to upskill and be ready for a new career in tech.
According to Tim Perron, ICTC’s Atlantic Regional Coordinator, the latest iteration of the program comes informed through research and successful track record.
“We’re offering this subsidy for folks that are mid-career,” said Perron. “They’ve actually been working in the oil patch up in Alberta, some of them for 15 years in some cases.”
While Perron knows it sounds a bit odd talking about downturns in the oil economy when we look at oil prices today, he noted when the initiative started in 2017, there was a big downturn in the oil patch, adding since then, investment is not what it was for fossil fuels.
“So many of the folks that are, (or have been) in the oil patch, as professionals, like geoscientists or petroleum engineers, that sort of career professional decided that they wanted to make a transition to more in-demand roles in the IT world,” he said.
Enter ICTC
Speaking July 21 at a virtual info session for Atlantic tech businesses, Perron, who’s based in Halifax, shared the success of some of the first cohort of talented cloud developers to come out of the program.
The Alberta pilot was managed by EDGE UP 2.0, a leading multi-stakeholder program that trains and supports professionals displaced from the oil and gas sector to pivot to careers in Calgary’s digital tech landscape.
“Most of the candidates are well experienced, they know what working is like, onboarding would be trivial for them,” explained Perron to his Atlantic stakeholders.
What is the process for someone to transition from a career as a petroleum engineer to a cloud developer or a data analyst?
To answer that question for job seekers and HR professionals alike, Perron described an ICTC research team working with a pool of 10 different career types, all prominent in Canada’s oil and gas industry.
“What skills does somebody in that role already have?” questioned Perron, adding ICTC then looked at the labour market in tech, in effort to match the skills gained in oil and gas to 20 different in-demand IT positions for candidates to transition into.
“What we did was look at what are the skills needed for someone to be a data analyst or cloud developer. We looked at the gap between what somebody already has as a mid-career oil and gas professional and what skills they needed to have to go into those new roles.”
A targetted approach
Perron said they partnered with Alberta’s various post-secondary institutions and industry partners to come up with an upskilling program.
“We were very intentional about the audience that we wanted to bring into the program,” remarked Perron. “We didn’t just do a bootcamp and say, ‘anybody can join it’ and then you come out the other end as a cloud developer.”
Perron gauged about 300 people went through the program for its second pilot through EDGE UP 2.0.
“The training was tailored to the position and where they want to transition into,” he added.
An AI advanced skills mapping framework for a petroleum engineer could show they have 53 percent of the required skills to become a QA tester, and then can quickly identify the areas where extra upgrading is needed to close the skills gap.
Perron says it’s easy then to know which programs each professional needs to take that are offered at the university and college level, adding some start-ups already participating in Alberta saw an immediate benefit to hiring a transitioning a mid-career professional over someone fresh out of university.
“These are experienced people that bring a lot of value with them right away – so hiring an experienced person made a difference to that particular start-up because the candidate here was a mature worker, so you’re not trying to show them what good work practices are, because they already know,” he said.
EDGE UP 2.0 has become a key element of the work to fill Calgary’s digital tech talent pipeline. The program has grown to include current training for product management with a specialization in digital product marketing, cyber security, data analytics, IT network management, full stack software development and AWS cloud computing.
Perron says there will be additional upskilled talent ready for those in-demand disciplines later in August and September.
The most recent cloud computing cohort, among the first to compete the program in June, are already available for placement according to Perron.
There are subsidies for mature IT Talent and mid-career professionals who are motivated career transitioners with Perron outlining work terms typically lasting 3-4 months.
Interested employers are invited to join an E-talent portal and leave information and links not only about their business, but also the jobs and types of skills they’re looking to hire in addition to proactively search resumes from a supplied database for the right experience.
Likewise, available talent upload their resume and qualifications, including recent experience as part of their own bio in the shared database
“That’s what this program gives employers”, said Perron, the access to a pool of talented individuals with those wage subsidies.”
He says in the case of a woman who is an underrepresented group in the STEM area, she would have been eligible for the $7,000 subsidy, “And if an employer feels the candidate is a good fit after the first three months or so, then you could offer her a full-time position,” he said.
Perron concluded by urging IT sector employers in the Atlantic region to sign up now, as plenty of new talent will be ready for work in the next month and into the early fall and having access to the database will help many of those businesses to bring someone skilled onboard.
“Full stack developers are coming out at the end of September, and there’s a lot of other talent that’s coming out in between as well.”