Examining the brain drain and how to reverse it

At a recent Communitech event, one of their members proudly stood up to announce that 90 per cent of Waterloo graduates accept jobs in Silicon Valley, and the other 10 per cent who don’t go, do so because they can’t get visas.

What’s wrong with this statement?

Well, a lot, considering many Canadian businesses are struggling to find top talent to help our technology companies grow. 

While many celebrate the fact that companies like Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Amazon are coming to Canada to hire our best graduates, companies like Delvinia are providing great careers here in Toronto.

And while Canadian universities often celebrate the percentage of graduates that are being hired by these organizations, Canadian CEOs recognize more must be done to support Canadian technology scale-ups and to retain our talent.

Retaining talent in Canada has been identified as a significant challenge by many of the technology CEOs who are members of the Council of Canadian Innovators. Following a conference call organized by the CCI, it became apparent that more needs to be done through government policies and programs to help Canadian companies provide attractive offers to retain our graduates. 

However, there has been very little research into why these graduates are leaving and what recommendations can be made to government to help Canadian firms retain talent.

So, my firm decided to be become part of the solution. Today, I’m proud to announce Delvinia has partnered with Mitacs and taken a leadership role to help address this issue.

We are initiating and funding an academic research study that will aim to answer the following three questions:

·        Why is Canadian STEM talent leaving?

·        Where is Canadian STEM talent going?

·        What can be done to retain the best and brightest Canadian STEM graduates?

We approached Dr. David Wolfe, co-Director of the Innovation Policy Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, and Dr. Nicole Goodman, a political science professor from Brock University, to supervise the research study, which is being led by post-doctoral student Zachary Spicer. 

Our goal is to have this academic research completed in the next four months, so that we can provide Canadian CEOs with evidence-based policy recommendations and can then sit down with our federal and provincial governments to affect positive change for Canadian technology scale-ups.

For more information about this research study, please see today’s press release.