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CANADIAN INDUSTRY ONLINE - DECEMBER 2013
E
ARL I ER THI S MONTH
I had
the great pleasure of acting as
master of ceremonies at an event host-
ed by one of our NACC members.
Ottawa’s Willis College of Business,
Technology and Healthcare announced
the expansion of an exclusive training
partnership with IT security firm Forti-
net Inc. This partnership is intended
to train IT professionals at Willis Col-
lege for work with Fortinet in systems
security.
A few months earlier Fortinet, a
California-based Fortune 500 company,
had a problem: they needed hundreds
of new employees to work in network
security, but had been unable to find
enough people with the qualifications
they were looking for. To go through a
regular hiring process would be time-
consuming with uncertain results.
How could this company better ensure
it got qualified workers within the
shortest time-frame?
Fortinet’s solution was decep-
tively simple: if qualified personnel
could not be found, then they could be
trained. A city the size of Ottawa has a
large workforce, including experienced
IT professionals who might simply
need a ‘topping up’ of specific skills
to allow them to work with Fortinet’s
systems.
To this end Fortinet partnered
with Willis College, a private career
college, to develop a two-stream cur-
riculum: one shorter program for es-
tablished IT professionals to top up
their skills, and a longer program
aimed at recent post-secondary gradu-
ates. With these programs set to begin
in the new year, Fortinet can expect an
influx of employees who are familiar
with their company and the jobs they
need them to do. Involvement at the
training level also gives Fortinet the
ability to get to know the strengths and
potential of prospective new employ-
ees.
Partnerships of this kind, while
certainly not unheard of in Canada,
particularly in the career college sec-
tor, are not as common here as they
are in other countries. This is a point
that federal Employment and Social
Development Minister Jason Kenney
has raised on several occasions when
discussing skills development and the
government’s proposed Canada Job
Grant.
As the keynote speaker at the
Willis-Fortinet launch event, Minis-
ter Kenney praised the initiative of all
participants in choosing to invest in
their own future. Rather than wait-
ing for government to take the lead,
Willis College, Fortinet and the train-
ees themselves are taking action. In
the process, they are closing Canada’s
skills gap at the local level and provid-
ing an example of the kind of partner-
ships that can and should be emulated
across our country.
That said, governments do have a
leading role to play in setting the over-
all skills agenda and addressing labour
market shortages. If you asked anyone
involved with the new Willis-Fortinet
program what their number one rea-
son for being there was, the answer
would not be, “to address the skills
gap”!
Companies need qualified work-
ers, schools need students, and stu-
dents need skills to become qualified
workers. If filling these needs ad-
dresses a broader skills gap, so much
the better, but that is an incidental out-
come. Partnerships like Willis-Fortinet
will be ad hoc at best unless policy
makers take steps to consistently pro-
mote this kind of partnership between
employers and educators.
This is already underway in other
countries, particularly in European
Union countries like France, Switzer-
land, Denmark and Germany. In fact,
Germany has had formal “dual train-
ing” systems in place for decades. But,
with the rapid technological advance-
ments of the last twenty years, there is
arguably a greater need than ever for a
post-secondary education system that
is adaptable to emerging market, la-
bour and technological developments.
According to the German Fed-
eral Ministry of Education and Re-
search, most secondary school gradu-
ates (some 60%) go through the dual
training system. These students are
placed with a company related to their
field of study for three to four days of
the week. The other one to two days
are spent in the classroom. This pro-
vides students with a very high rate
of employment following graduation
because they have real-world experi-
ence and often already know and are
known by their employer upon gradu-
ation.
