Waterloo Region is fastest-growing tech talent market in Canada

WATERLOO REGION — A new report says Waterloo Region is the fastest-growing tech talent market in Canada, and the second-fastest in North America.

The 2017 Scoring Canadian Tech Talent report, prepared by commercial real estate firm CBRE, found that the region added 8,400 tech jobs from 2011 to 2016.

At 65.6 per cent, that’s the highest growth rate among the 10 Canadian metropolitan areas analyzed in the report, and second only in North America to Charlotte, N.C., with a growth rate of 77.1 per cent.

That explosive growth in the local tech sector — 5,600 of those new jobs were added in 2016 alone — helped to boost the region’s overall tech talent ranking to fifth place in Canada, up from eighth last year.

“It’s a huge accomplishment,” said Todd Cooney, CBRE’s vicepresident of office leasing and sales in Waterloo Region. “It’s a testament to what we’ve done here.”

The report compared statistics from organizations including Statistics Canada and Environics Analytics for Toronto, Ottawa, London, Vancouver, Montreal, Calgary, Edmonton, Halifax, Winnipeg and Waterloo Region in such

categories as tech talent supply, growth, concentration, cost and education. Tech talent jobs include computer support and database systems workers, technology and engineering, software developers and programmers, and computer systems managers.

The report’s overall rankings placed Toronto in the top spot for the two years it has been compiled. Runners-up were Ottawa and Vancouver, with Waterloo Region landing in fifth place.

Not only is the region seeing growth as companies expand, it’s attracting new investment from other areas thanks to the availability of talent, a welcoming, collaborative ecosystem, and the value employers find in operating here.

“It’s one of the cheaper places in the country for tech firms to operate,” Cooney said. It’s also one of the least expensive places for employees to live.

For a sample company with 500 employees and a 75,000 square feet space, it would cost about $36.9 million a year in wage and rent costs in Waterloo Region, the report determined.

That’s a fair bit less than the $44 million estimate for Calgary, at the top of the oneyear cost list, but still higher than Montreal, Winnipeg, Halifax and London, which rounds out the one-year cost list at about $33 million.

Reductions in square footage at BlackBerry in recent years yielded plenty of available space well-suited to other tech firms.

“They’re able to move their company in almost in a turnkey state,” Cooney said.

The CBRE report says there are about 776,000 tech talent jobs in Canada, representing just over five per cent of the total workforce.

Waterloo Region’s 21,200 tech talent jobs in 2016 represented about 2.7 per cent of the country’s tech workforce, but 8.6 per cent of total local jobs.

“Not many others can say they’re so tech-focused,” Cooney said.

Samantha Clark, public relations manager at Communitech, noted the report mentions the federal government’s Global Skills Strategy and the impact it could have in making it easier for businesses to attract high-skilled workers from abroad.

“We’re really looking to attract the best tech talent in the world,” she said.

The region does slip behind many of the other centres when it comes to educational attainment — 29.2 per cent of local adults between 25 and 64 have earned a bachelor’s degree or higher. While that’s slightly above the national average of 28.4 per cent, it’s a far cry from the top performer in this category, Ottawa, at 45.2 per cent.

Cooney believes there are opportunities for schools like Wilfrid Laurier University and Conestoga College to make further inroads in the tech community.

Improvements in transit links to Toronto could also help to boost Waterloo Region’s standing in the rankings even further, Cooney said. “If we have better connections, all it’s going to do is foster better tech growth for both communities,” he said.

Pursuing better links is imperative, even though the tech industry knows they won’t appear overnight, Clark said. “It’s incredibly important to the success of the region.”