Benefactor Hopes New Lab Will Lure Tech Talent To New Brunswick
FREDERICTON — On September 28, the Shankar Computer Science Laboratory opened at the University of New Brunswick’s faculty of Computer Science. It brought New Brunswick one step closer to closing the gap between available technology jobs and the people needed to fill them.
A long way from the punch cards the faculty would have used when Subramonian Shankar was an electrical engineering student there in 1976, the new facility features 74 workstation-class machines and an additional 70 machines that students can access from home.
Shankar, who originally hails from India, gifted the $1-million lab to UNB in recognition of its help getting his career started more than 40 years ago. He started the computer manufacturing firm American Megatrends Inc. in 1985 and is president and CEO of Amzetta Technologies, and of the philanthropic Lakshan Foundation.
“This lab is going to greatly help us in being able to expand our program,” says Patricia Evans, the acting dean of computer science at UNB.
“It’s a great platform for the growth of our program… Having something that is new, wonderful, state-of-the-art is something that can help us attract students from elsewhere. And, hopefully, as students get involved with local companies, particularly through co-ops, there’ll be a lot of reasons for them to stay here.”
Tech deficit
The Shankar lab supports the work of undergraduate computer science students and software engineers and next year will begin supporting graduate students.
It comes just in time. New Brunswick has identified a significant deficit in technology professionals and doesn’t have enough now, or into the future, to keep the province competitive.
Salaries from information technology [IT] careers in New Brunswick are estimated at $700 million per year, according to the recently released New Brunswick Information Technology Workforce Growth Plan, which is a roadmap for the province’s tech sector created by TechImpact and Jupia Consulting.
The study found that nearly 10,000 people work in IT or IT-related jobs in New Brunswick, with over 4,000 people working directly in the IT professional services industry, IT product companies, or startups in nearly 300 companies.
But the province lags behind the rest of Canada when it comes to IT being used to support businesses in other sectors; the province is losing competitive advantage as other jurisdictions exploit technology to make their companies more streamlined and agile.
The biggest red flag is the disconnect between the 8,000-plus jobs anticipated to be available in the sector in the next three-to-five years and the talent available to fill them.
Despite this looming need for technology workers, TechImpact CEO Cathy Simpson says almost 70 percent of New Brunswick businesses surveyed didn’t have a recruitment plan to retain the talent from the provinces’ universities and technical schools.
“That’s what I think is so interesting about some of these initiatives like the lab because we’re trying to increase the university’s capacity to attract and recruit quality students and faculty members,” she says.
“As they are learning more about things like artificial intelligence and advanced manufacturing in cybersecurity and data science and machine learning, they’re becoming more qualified to help businesses understand what types of technology they can implement in order to grow and evolve, change the way they do business.”
“We tend to think about so much of this about the technology. It’s really about helping the company be more efficient, sell more, innovate, be competitive.”
Simpson says New Brunswick companies need to recognize that the retention process of talent, like the students who will be using the Shankar lab, doesn’t begin after graduation but long before.
“Is the lab going to attract more students? Absolutely. Is it going to attract more businesses to get more hands-on involved? Absolutely,” she says. “Businesses are starting to understand that, in order for [them] to have people that can fill these job openings, [they] have to go start to meet these students when they’re in first and second year.”
Multifaceted strategy
The Government of New Brunswick has asked TechImpact to lead the roadmap they helped create for the next two years to better position the province for the challenges ahead. It created a steering committee that has half a dozen projects underway, including the UNB coding bootcamp and an IBM skills build program that was announced in July in partnership with the McKenna Institute at UNB. The free digital program will help up to 40,000 participants earn employer recognized technical skills within just a few weeks.
These initiatives are just part of the multifaceted approach being taken to address tech sector labour challenges the province is experiencing both now and in the future.
“For the computer science faculty this gift from Subramanian Shankar, it’s very significant,” says Adrienne Oldford, the executive director of the McKenna Institute, which has the goal of “advancing New Brunswick’s digital transformation.”
“This is a piece of the puzzle that adds to this goal that we have for New Brunswick to compete globally in a digital society and a digital economy.”
Oldford says the cumulative momentum of all the actions the province, businesses, and academia are taking are making an impact.
In addition to the Shankar Lab, UNB and the McKenna Institiute have undertaken a Fellowship in Digital Education, the Barrett Chair in Entrepreneurship for Digital Transformation, and the Digital Learning Network, which connects a cohort of 50 high school teachers with the faculty of computer science.
“The best outcome in the next five years is that we have the talent so that companies in New Brunswick can grow from here and compete globally. That would be an amazing outcome for our province.”
Alex Graham is a Huddle reporter in Saint John. Send her your feedback and story ideas: [email protected].