Look north, workers advised

Computerworld - Unemployed U.S. IT workers may be able to find work in Canada, where near-shore outsourcers take advantage of their country's lower costs.
The average IT salary paid by Keane Inc. to employees at its application development center in Halifax, Nova Scotia, is around $60,000 Canadian, or roughly $45,000 U.S., based on recent exchange rates.
While that pay rate might seem low to U.S. IT workers, it's "considerably higher" than the average salary in the Halifax area, said Stephen Lund, president and CEO of Nova Scotia Business Inc., a government-backed economic development agency. "You can live in Nova Scotia with a lot less money than you can live in a lot of other places," he said.
And Keane is hiring. The company last month launched a national recruiting drive in Canada for its Halifax center, now at a head count of 300 and growing 30% annually, a Keane spokesman said.
Although Boston-based Keane doesn't actively recruit in the U.S. for its Canadian center, it welcomes U.S. workers, who make up about 5% of its workforce there.
Other Canadian service providers are also hiring, but none appears to be actively recruiting U.S. workers. They're finding what they need from Canada's labor pool, although they encourage U.S. IT employees to compete for jobs there.
"There is always a demand for good IT people, but to say there is a shortage -- I wouldn't say that," said Peter Thompson, CEO of RIS Resource Information Systems Inc. The Calgary, Alberta-based near-shore services provider employs approximately 400 workers, and that number is growing annually by about 20%, he said.
Open Invitation
CGI Group Inc., which is Canada's largest IT company in terms of the number of its employees, increased its head count by more than 5,000 in the past year, from 14,600 to more than 20,000. Half of that growth came from acquisitions of other companies.
"We've been quietly growing very rapidly," said Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for Montreal-based CGI Group. She said some of the Canada-based workers are likely U.S. expatriates, but the company doesn't maintain such statistics. It hasn't had to recruit in the U.S. to fill Canadian jobs, Murphy said.
But a top Canadian government official, Keith Parsonage, director general of Industry Canada's Information and Communications Technologies branch, said there's a demand for U.S. workers in Canada, and the country has a liberal immigration policy to encourage IT workers to head north. All U.S. workers need is to have a job offer and meet certain educational and training criteria, he said.
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