Elizabeth Babcock says it takes almost three weeks to do a task her U.S. peers can finish in one day.



A project coordinator at a large international information company in Toronto, Babcock says she enters data by hand because she doesn’t have the automated documentation software used by her counterparts across the border.



“It’s hard enough to do your job when you don’t have the tools to do your work to the best of your abilities,” Babcock said, declining to name her employer out of concern about retribution. The difficulty is “made more clear when people are doing the same job as you in a different country who do have the technology.”

Occasionally I teach technologists at a local community college (kind of like UOIT). They have almost 100% employment rates post-graduation.While (professional) engineers, as Anonymouse points out, tend to have 70% unemployment rates.Employers have been, IMHO, skimping seriously on R&D, skimping on hiring top-tier professionals, in favour of just hiring "good enough" technicians to keep their systems running.I'd say the giant problem in Canada is a lack of strategic long-term vision, and this is reflected in the sorts of professionals that are demanded in the workforce.We do an appalling job. Mr. Dyson made his fortune not through engineering, but rather, through slick marketing of relatively 'average' quality vacuum cleaners.How STEM professionals are treated in the USA, also has a direct impact in Canada because of the tight integration of our labour markets. We were able to cover up a good chunk of our STEM employment crisis in Canada in the 80s and 90s (after the mining industry/oil industry de-celerated) by exporting our talent to the USA. Now we have a mining and oil industry revival, which has been great for MechEng/Civil/Petroleum/Geological, but the EE/Software/Computer fields have suffered enormously, and the USA can no longer accept Canada's surplus.Here's a good article in the Financial Post: