Interesting article from CBC about job growth in the Ottawa area. Invest Ottawa says 10,000 positions will be filled by 2019, with around 3,000 in the Kanata North area. That will impact the Stittsville area, where many of those Kanata North employees may end up calling home:
The Kanata North BIA said the tech sector in the region has to fill 3,000 positions in the coming months as BlackBerry QNX and Ford hire for the autonomous vehicle hub and existing companies expand.
Invest Ottawa predicts nearly 10,000 new jobs in the city by 2019 and said those jobs will come in a range of technology fields.
James Baker, CEO of recruiting company the Keynote Group, said he’s receiving calls from four to five new clients a week who are looking to hire new talent.
One challenge has been finding people with certain skill sets outside Ottawa’s traditional strengths from a decade ago.
“We’ve moved to development. We were a hardware city, we’re moving into a software city,” he said. “Now the self-driving car is coming as well, which is a whole other spin on what we can do in Ottawa.”
Larger companies like Shopify, Amazon and BlackBerry QNX are forcing companies to compete for people with specializations in software as a service, automatic vehicles and artificial intelligence.