How Indigenous Communities Helped PQA Testing Solve Its Labour Force Shortage
FREDERICTON – If only every company could tackle their labour shortage challenge with such precision and success.
In the years after Keith McIntosh founded PQA Testing in 1997, he had no problem filling jobs, with the Fredericton-based software company employing around 100 people by 2010.
“In the early days, people were accessible and the company grew and grew,” said Susan Holt, the company’s VP of strategy and sales. “Then things got tight in the last decade, where universities weren’t putting out enough new grads to fill available jobs. It became a challenge to find experienced people.”
Holt was part of a panel this week in Saint John at a conference on labour force challenges organized by the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council (APEC). The organization staged events on this topic in three other cities this week as well: Charlottetown, St. John’s and Halifax.
It’s been much discussed of late that New Brunswick will face a shortage of 120,000 workers in the next decade, and the participants at the APEC conference addressed a number of potential solutions, including increasing immigration and developing strategies and training programs to employ people from segments of the population with high unemployment rates.
Holt told a packed room of business leaders, politicians, economic development experts and government bureaucrats that McIntosh discovered a solution to his labour force woes in 2015, the year the Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC) forecasted there would be 182,000 unfilled IT positions across Canada by 2019.
That same year, McIntosh was part of a Governor General’s leadership conference in Montreal. One day he met with the CEO of Power Corp in a skyscraper; the next day he visited a school in the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory outside the city. From the reserve, with its high rate of poverty and poor infrastructure, McIntosh could see the Montreal skyscraper and and he had a sudden realization, says Holt.
“I’ve been struggling with IT vacancies in my company and we have a massively under-represented population both in the IT sector and in the economy broadly,” McIntosh said about the light bulb moment he had on the reserve that day.
The federal government had recently released the Truth and Reconciliation report and one of the calls to action focused on indigenous training and employment. “Ensure that Aboriginal peoples have equitable access to jobs, training, and education opportunities in the corporate sector, and that Aboriginal communities gain long-term sustainable benefits from economic development projects.” stated a section of Action 92.
Holt says PQA recognized the untapped potential in these communties.
“Indigenous people are twice as likely to be unemployed as non-indigenous people,” said Holt. “But their population is growing at a rate four times faster than the rest of the country, and they are younger.”
David Chaundy, CEO of APEC, says lowering the high unemployment rate in this historically disadvantaged group of workers would require tailored programming.
“The issue with the indigenous groups is not the participation rate. You have the same participation rate as non-indigenous population. The challenge is they face higher unemployment rates, particularly on reserve and [we have to] find ways to reduce these barriers,” said Chaundy in his introductory speech at the Saint John conference. “These are longstanding issues and we have to think very carefully about what types of strategies and programs would help improve access for specific groups like this.”
As it turns out, McIntosh had a solution in mind. He came home from that trip to Montreal and decided to take action himself by training indigenous people to be software testers. By September of that year, the company had set up a foundational class of indigenous software testing in New Brunswick.
Since then, PLATO, the sister company to PQA that trains and employees indigenous people, has run 13 different classes across the country and built teams of indigenous software testers in Miramichi, Fredericton, Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto, Calgary, Edmonton and Regina and Vancouver.
McIntosh consulted widely with indigenous communities about setting up the company’s education and employment programs. PQA has partnered with indigenous community and business organizations like JEDI (New Brunswick), Miziwe Biik (Toronto), Indian Friendship Centre (Sault Ste. Marie) and Rupertsland (Alberta). PLATO leader Denis Carignan is Cree from the Pasqua Nation in Saskatchewan.
“So this is one of the ways our company tried to address the labour force challenges we faced,” said Holt. “But it goes further than tapping into an under-represented group. It’s a training solution but it’s also a social impact solution. What it’s meant for PQA and PLATO, broadly, as our sister companies, is our ability to attract talent and fill positions in PQA has increased dramatically.”
Holt says the companies just had their best year yet hiring 68 new people to bring the company workforce to nearly 200. They anticipate building a network in the coming years of 1,000 indigenous software workers across the country.
She credits much of their growth to the social mission that inspires both graduating students and older, more experienced workers.
“The social impact mission that we’re on has attracted to us new grads,” she said. “We’re winning the competition for talent at the universities across this country because they want to come work for a company that has a purpose and has a mission they can get excited about. It’s also helped with our experienced hires and our retention levels have grown significantly.”