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Déjà Leonard is a copywriter and freelance journalist based in Calgary.
While Canadian tech employers already struggle to find talent, announcements such as that of Meta’s – revealing recently they’ll be setting up shop in Toronto with a plan to hire 2,500 workers – only serve to reinforce the challenge.
“I know that my team is getting approached every single day by recruiters who represent these big firms or by these firms directly,” Erin Bury, chief executive officer of Willful, a 15-person startup founded in Toronto, said to Global News.
To take advantage of this growing demand for labour in tech, or to reboot their careers, many Canadians are turning to boot camps to quickly learn the skills they need – but it comes at a cost.
Do the dollars make sense?
As an example, BrainStation, a global company with in-person campuses in Canada, offers coding boot camps and tech courses. The company’s full-time web-development boot camp takes about three months to complete and costs $15,000.
The website says graduates have a more than 90-per-cent hiring rate within 180 days of completing the course.
The data-science boot camp at Lighthouse Labs, another well-known Canadian tech-education company, takes 12 weeks and costs $14,000. The website says graduates achieved a 95-per-cent employment rate.
The company recently released a report on its student outcomes for 2021: The average starting salary for those who found a job after their course was $54,450 a year. Nineteen per cent of grads make $60,000-$69,000 and 11 per cent make more than $70,000.
Tech salaries still on the rise
According to a report by Deel, a global hiring and payroll startup, Canadian tech salaries have increased by 38 per cent since 2019.
“Global hiring has never been more popular between pandemic-related office closures, fierce talent competition, and a bevy of online tools enabling collaboration and reducing hiring complications,” the report says.
The Hays 2022 Canada Salary Guide shares compensation and benefit trends by job category.
It lists the hottest tech jobs as cybersecurity engineers, data engineers, front-end developers, full-stack java developers, integration architects and project managers.
It includes national salary ranges for a variety of tech jobs, and the figures do not include benefits or bonuses.
To name a few: data managers make between $60,000-$120,000, front-end developers make $100,000-$120,000 and chief technology officers are making up to $270,000.
Technology impacts in the future
It’s not just the struggle for tech talent that will continue to affect the market. The technology these workers are building will also impact those who don’t work in the industry.
According to the Hays survey, 46 per cent of employees expect their job to change because of tech in the next three years – whether through automation or the need to learn new technology – increasing their desire to upskill.
What I’m reading around the web
- Landfills are growing at an unsustainable rate in most countries, but Sweden has managed to send just 1 per cent of its trash to landfills. See how the country is incinerating nearly half of its garbage to create energy that powers homes and buildings.
- GitLab created an informative guide on how to communicate effectively and responsibly through text – a skill that has become essential in the remote-work world. Read on to get a better understanding of how to interpret tone, low-context communication and feedback in a virtual setting.
- You’ve likely heard of the many people who have quit their jobs for better pay or more purposeful work. But what about those who are choosing to stick around at their jobs and coast by? According to one study, 39 per cent of people are doing it.
- According to this article, 90 per cent of long-haul trucking could be replaced by self-driving technology. But it’s complicated – think about factors such as infrastructure, erratic weather and government regulations. Yet, several startups are betting the industry will explode.
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