If there is currently a quasi-unanimous message in Quebec, from both politicians and the business community alike, it is that the province needs more entrepreneurs.
Lucien Bouchard recently professed that Quebec needs more young entrepreneurs to ensure its future prosperity. Michel Patry, Director of HÉC Montréal, speaks of an entrepreneurial deficit to fill in the coming years. Data presented by the Fondation de l’Entrepreneurship shows that the intention to start a business is lower in Quebec than elsewhere in Canada. The Table d’Action de l’Entrepreneuriat chaired by Moment Factory’s Éric Fournier aims to increase to 10,000 the number of Montreal-based entrepreneurs from now until 2020.
Yes, Quebec needs more entrepreneurs, especially in the sectors of web and mobile technology. That said, increasing the number of entrepreneurs will not be sufficient to ensure Quebec’s economic prosperity. To build big companies, entrepreneurs will need access to technical talent.
We need to do more to encourage the development of technical talent able to bring our entrepreneurs’ visions to life. In fact, employees #1, #2 and #3 are nothing without the 100, 1000 or 10,000 employees who join the founding team to ensure the company’s growth.
Builders to support builders
Even though the spark for Google was born from the exceptional vision of its founders, a large part of the company’s success is attributable to its ability to recruit a large quantity of high-caliber talent. After approximately 15 years in business, Google now has more than 47,000 employees. According to some estimates, there are between 15,000 and 20,000 web developers. Its competitors Microsoft and Amazon each now have more than 100,000 employees.
If Sergei Brin and Larry Page had received a diploma from McGill’s computer engineering faculty or from the Montreal Polytechnique rather than Stanford University in California, would they have been able to find the next 10,000 engineers and specialized world-class employees in Quebec to grow their business?
Therefore, I ask the question: What if the scarce resource in our flourishing entrepreneurial ecosystem was currently not venture capital, nor a lack of interesting projects, nor even a lack of entrepreneurs, but rather the depth of the technical talent pool capable of transforming ideas into reality?
Deepening our talent pool
Young businesses have a great need for technical talent to support their growth, but they are not alone. In the era of globalization and e-commerce, mid-size and large businesses in all sectors are snapping up technical talent.
Start-up businesses typically seek technical talent comprised of engineers, web developers, software programmers, designers, mobile app developers, database administrators and online marketing specialists.
This technical talent is involved in several functions within start-up businesses. To start, there are engineers and developers who become founders or co-founders, and by doing so, plunge head first into the entrepreneurial adventure. Secondly, there are very talented engineers who join the ranks of startups shortly after they are launched and who play key roles, making major product contributions and serving as mentors to the rest of their technical team. Then, there are engineers and developers who help to build an ecosystem conducive to technical talent development. In addition to their work, these developers organize community events such as Montréal Python, Cocoa Heads or Confoo, and spend time helping to develop the other members of our community.
If it is difficult, in the absence of a specific study on the subject, to get a precise idea of the depth of our technical talent pool, but it is clear that we are very far from having abundance. The Order of Quebec Engineers has approximately 68,000 members (in all specialties of engineering combined), with 2,700 new registrations coming from young graduates last year. For its’ part, Service Canada estimates the number of IT professionals at 87,800, which represents about 2.25% of the Quebec workforce.
Good developers are rare and competition for talent is fierce. Many start-up business leaders told me that, last year, they struggled to find developers and top-notch technical talent in sufficient quantities to grow their business as quickly as desired. Recently, some of these entrepreneurs have decided to move their operations or to open satellite offices outside of Quebec, not only to be closer to investors, but also because they feel that the leading-edge talent pool is bigger in Toronto, Boston, New York or San Francisco.
Drafting a gameplan
The community of Quebec start-ups is well aware of the situation and different players are currently collaborating to address it. That said, it is necessary to develop a truly concerted plan of attack, mobilizing political, business and institutional environments. If this article has taken the form of a manifest, it is one. My objective is to generate collective reflection on an extremely important subject for Quebec’s economic future.
Here are some ways to get the ball rolling:
1) Collaborate with the universities
Unless they have developed their skills by themselves between classes, recently graduated young engineers often need upgrading or mentoring before being able to step in and make major contributions to start-up businesses. We must double our efforts to train qualified workers who can quickly create value for the companies who will hire them.
For example, our universities can offer more courses on modern programming languages such as Python, Ruby or JavaScript for the web and Objective C and Java for mobile app development; continue to invest in faculty quality by attracting the best professors in the world; support training programs leading to technical diplomas; support student initiatives like McHacks (the largest university hackathon in Canadian history, recently organized by a very dynamic group of McGill students); work more closely with placement agencies to organize student internships in start-up companies; and, most importantly, encourage high-school students to undertake university studies in engineering and sciences.
2) Guide talent toward growing businesses
In Quebec, many large companies or multinationals employ a large proportion of technical talent, who are attracted by the prestige, salary and stability provided. Start-up businesses, however, offer dynamic work environments that are more competitive, which also deserve to be showcased in the consideration set.
The entrepreneurial context provides a far greater learning speed and a higher potential for career development. In terms of compensation, many SMEs now have the means to offer salaries ranging from $50-$100K or more to talented young developers, as they can take advantage of research and development tax credits or similar e-commerce credits.
Start-ups must speak up and promote themselves as attractive employers. Certain newly established events, such as MTL Startup Talent or Montreal Startup Open House, help talent to discover and to connect with young, growing businesses. That said, this is not enough. Start-ups are still too often under-represented in campus career fairs. The Founder Project as well as the McGill Startup Career Fair, organized by the McGill Entrepreneurs Society, are excellent initiatives that could serve as models for structuring new projects and programs. Venture capital firms must also play a larger role to help attract the best talent for businesses in their investment portfolios.
3) Attract talent from outside Quebec
In Silicon Valley, where one of the deepest pools of technical talent in the world is found, there is currently legislation to increase the visa limits to attract additional technical talent from around the world, especially from India and Eastern Europe. Quebec must also follow suit.
Since 2013, the Startup Visa Canada program has facilitated the importation of foreign entrepreneurs and engineers. We should be proud of this initiative, which has also been the envy of some of our neighbors to the South. However, when it comes to talent mobility and work visas, the barriers are still too great and the restrictions too numerous — especially with the US, our primary business partner.
Finally, it is estimated that there are more than 350,000 Canadians currently employed in Silicon Valley companies. Assuming the same proportionality as Canada’s overall population, we can estimate that about 23% or 80,000 are originally from Quebec. It is appropriate to ask whether it’s time to repatriate some of our talent back to Quebec by inviting them to play a role in our most promising local businesses.
Organizing high-quality events can also help attract this talent to Montreal. For example, the Pycon 2014 conference at the beginning of April attracted more than 2000 participants from all over the world, including the best experts from this technical community.
The next 10,000
As Lucien Bouchard reminded us in his recent article, we must continue to celebrate the achievements of Quebec’s visionary entrepreneurs, like Joseph-Armand Bombardier. That said, let’s not forget to celebrate the tens of thousands of engineers who joined him in the beginning and took the first bold steps to help a company like Bombardier grow.
Without a vast pool of technical talent, the ideas of Quebec entrepreneurs will remain only ideas, and our vision of a prosperous Quebec will remain just that — a vision.
[Note: This article was originally published here in Les Affaires in French]
Photo: Flickr