Training Transforms a Region’s Economy-The province of New Brunswick breathed new life into a dying economy by creating 20,000 new technology jobs and trained residents for them.

Situated along the Gulf of St. Lawrence in eastern
Canada, the province of New Brunswick is blessed with
forests of spruce and balsam fir, hillsides rich in copper,
lead, and zinc, and offshore waters filled with herring, cod,
and crabs.

By Patrick J Kiger Workforce.com

(Many thanks to Al Jones for passing along this article and his comment: "WOW example of comparable state, New Brunswick in Canada" What can Montana learn from their example?- Russ)

For generations, residents made their livings in
lumber mills, mines, and fishing boats, collecting and
processing the natural wealth. But by the early 1990s, the
provincial government’s economic planners realized that
the traditional way of life was no longer sustainable and,
unless the economy changed quickly, New Brunswick
faced a bleak future.

As the province struggled to automate, it had to shed jobs.
Its old resource-based industries could no longer compete
in the new world economy. "We already had 15 percent
unemployment," says Leonard Weeks, an HR professional
who is New Brunswick’s manager in charge of knowledge
industry and innovation. "And our projections showed that
during the 1990s, we were going to lose at least 10,000
more industrial jobs, nearly 5 percent of the province’s
workforce." Beyond that, the lack of opportunity in the
region was causing young educated people to move to
other parts of Canada and the United States.

New Brunswick officials knew they had to find a way to
reverse the unemployment tide before it turned into a
tsunami that might wreck the province’s already
destabilized economy. It was the sort of dire plight that
demanded a radical solution.

Fortunately, the province’s political leader at the time,
Premier Frank McKenna, was a man with an
unconventional style of thinking. "Chairman Frank," as the
Canadian newsmagazine Maclean’s once labeled him,
liked to think of himself not as a politician in charge of one
of Canada’s poorest provinces but as a business executive
running a big, diversified corporation. He was fond of
applying ideas that worked in business to
government—total quality management, performance
benchmarking, and customer-service orientation.

Like a turnaround expert trying to revive a failing company,
McKenna methodically assessed New Brunswick’s
prospects. The existing industries weren’t going to add
new workers. And the province’s small size—at 750,000,
its population was roughly a third that of the city of
Toronto—and relatively remote location made it an unlikely
choice for new manufacturing operations.

Instead, McKenna decided that the province had to
reposition itself. It must develop a new, growing industry
where it could quickly become a leader in a field in which
initiative mattered more than location. He zeroed in on the
then nascent field of information technology and
multimedia. With companies increasingly relying on
computer networks and the Internet to manage their
far-flung global operations, it seemed like a promising bet.

Additionally, the strategy enabled New Brunswick to
leverage a significant asset—1,800 miles of fiber-optic
cable that its phone company, NBTel, already had
installed. The project was an effort to create a digital
phone network, and cost $50 million. That same
infrastructure could be harnessed for high-speed data
transmission, giving the rural province enough bandwidth
to compete with large metropolitan workers.

At its core, New Brunswick’s economic crisis was
an HR problem that required an inspired HR
approach.

But McKenna’s vision contained one big if. To transform
New Brunswick’s economy, the province needed plenty of
technologically skilled, intellectually creative people. That
was no easy task in a place where the populace was more
accustomed to fishing lines than keyboards, the youngest
and brightest had fled, and the older workers feared new
technology and change. At its core, New Brunswick’s
economic crisis was an HR problem that required an
inspired HR approach. Weeks posed this question: "As
we’re building the technology base, why not use it to
develop our workers?" The workforce could serve
essentially as a laboratory subject for the information
products that New Brunswick sought to develop.

Today, a decade later, the success of the HR strategy is
obvious. Largely because of its information-technology
thrust, New Brunswick’s unemployment rate has dropped
5 percent. Twenty thousand people are now employed in
the new sector, and the province’s training infrastructure
produces more than 2,500 workers skilled in software
development and content creation each year.

With IT employment growing at a 30 percent annual rate,
workers now are moving into the province to find jobs. Both
New Brunswick’s economy and its image have undergone
a dramatic shift. The former rural rust belt is now
considered a global leader in producing software and
content for distance learning and online corporate training.
Its information products are used by an estimated 100,000
companies worldwide.

In March, IBM hired two New Brunswick companies,
Advanced Training & Services and CertifyOnline.com, to
train Web developers throughout the world. Paul
McErlean, IBM Canada’s vice president of software, says
the technology giant’s decision was influenced largely by
"the amazing amount of skills" possessed by the
province’s technology-savvy workers. The workers also
produce much of the content for SmartForce, an Irish
company that is the world’s biggest provider of online
learning services to businesses.

HR’s leadership helped New Brunswick to reinvent itself.
For its outstanding turnaround, the province wins the
Workforce Optimas Award for Innovation.

Creating a high-tech training infrastructure
In the early 1990s, one of New Brunswick’s biggest
challenges was simply finding a way to provide training to
thousands of people scattered throughout the largely rural
province. "You simply couldn’t build and staff a new school
everywhere that you needed to reach people," Weeks
says.

New Brunswick turned to one of its existing
assets—NBTel’s fiber-optic network. "Our
telecommunications infrastructure was second to none in
the world," he notes. "Literally, you could get a digital line
in your hunting camp." From 1991 to 1994, the
government set up a dozen tele-education centers across
the province. The centers were equipped with computers,
video-conferencing equipment, and digital "white board"
technology that displayed an instructor’s writing and
diagrams to students in a classroom hundreds of miles
away. Over the next five years, the province increased the
number of centers to 100. Today, the TeleEducation NB
program offers tens of thousands of course offerings, in at
least five languages.

When the program was in its infancy in the early 1990s,
instructional software and course content for retraining
workers was virtually nonexistent. As a result, the province
was forced to create its own offerings. At New Brunswick
Community College-Miramichi, the teaching staff began
developing classes, and eventually the school established
the Distributed Learning Centre, which has created two
dozen technology-based courses. Since there was an
obvious market for courseware, the college came up with
an ingenious solution. Why not train students how to
create it? Funded with $15 million in grants from the
province, Canada’s federal government, and some
private-sector partners, the college in 1994 became the
first institution in North America to establish a program
devoted specifically to educational technology. The
Multimedia Learning Technology Center of Excellence
offered instruction in virtual reality, game design, computer
animation, and other technical skills. It also taught
students how to use those skills to design online courses.

The learning center’s two-year program incorporated other
novel tactics. There are no tests or exams. Instead, in
order to graduate, students show competency by actually
producing a viable product. They are divided into
entrepreneurial teams, which are legally incorporated as
companies, and assigned to work with private-sector
clients, who provide guidance and are committed to
purchasing the finished product. There was a shift from
watching to learning by doing.

To help further nurture that transformation, in 1996 New
Brunswick started Miratech, a center four miles from the
NBCC-M campus that serves as an incubator for
technology start-ups. Within two years, the center housed
12 new information-technology companies, many of them
run by graduates of NBCC-M’s educational-technology
program. Today, a typical Miratech tenant is HLS
Multimedia, which employs more than a dozen animators
to produce educational CD-ROMs for a California-based
distributor.

Helping workers adjust to a new work culture
New Brunswick officials realized early on that there was
more to retraining than simply teaching new technological
skills. Workers accustomed to spending eight hours a day
in a lumber mill or cannery had to make the transition to a
new world with very different demands and stresses.
"Traditionally, we don’t have a hard-driven, hustling
culture," Weeks says. "We have a service-oriented
culture. We’re very diligent at work, but we’re not used to
leading the way. So basically, we’ve had to introduce the
concept of entrepreneurship—to teach people to create
their own opportunities. If there’s no one out there to hire
you, start your own shop."

Additionally, a worker studying to switch careers faced
very different challenges than the typical college student.
The "re-careering" workers generally were 15 to 20 years
older and had families, mortgages, and other obligations
that their 20-something classmates didn’t have to worry
about. They had to learn how to keep up with those
responsibilities, while striving to succeed in a demanding
field where the workday seldom ends at 5 p.m. and travel
is often essential. "When you’re more mature, it’s not so
easy to go off for three months to work on a project in
India just because there’s a business opportunity there,"
Lobban says.

One of the keys to helping workers make such a
transition, Lobban says, is helping them to understand
themselves. NBCC-M makes extensive use of the
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and other testing tools, so
that re-careering workers can get an objective picture of
their strengths, liabilities, and inclinations. "We’re even
starting to test potential students," she says.

Another important part is getting continuous feedback from
the retraining workers about what sort of extracurricular
help they need. Lobban meets each month with student
representatives to assess NBCC-M’s programs and
services and how they might be improved. As a result of
those discussions, the school has added services
specifically tailored to re-careering workers’ needs—for
example, programs on how to cope with stress and
manage debt load. "We started a dinner-theater outing,"
she says. "For the more mature retraining students, that
was a more comfortable atmosphere than, say, a pub
night. And it still gave them the opportunity to network with
other entrepreneurs and develop the sort of relationships
that are crucial when they go out into the business world."

Achieving fuller participation in the retraining
process
Many of the re-careering workers attracted to the NBCC-M
program already had college degrees, some supervisory
experience, and track records in their former professions.
But New Brunswick officials wanted to reach the widest
possible range of workers—not just those who’d occupied
lower rungs in the province’s traditional economy but also
individuals who’d never quite been able to succeed before.

For that reason, in the mid 1990s, New Brunswick
installed Internet access in more than 230 schools,
recreation centers, and other gathering places in small
towns throughout the province. The Community Access
program offered free e-mail accounts, Internet access, and
computers and printers, as well as basic instruction on
using those resources, to anyone who walked in the door.
The idea was to give people who hadn’t been exposed to
computing a chance to become comfortable with the
technology—and eventually, to use it for retraining.

But program director Gary Wood didn’t leave any of that
up to chance. The key to having the centers work as a
retraining tool, he says, "is to make people feel as if
they’re in control of the program, that they own it." Before
opening a center, Wood and his staff set up a meeting
with town residents, to do what he calls "community asset
mapping."

"Basically, we would find out what skills, interests, and
other assets the people had, and get them to talk about
how they might utilize those assets with the help of
computers," he says. (In farming communities, for
example, Wood discovered an interest in developing
bookkeeping and management skills related to
agriculture.)

Additionally, Wood came up with the idea of hiring
unemployed or under-employed workers who were eligible
for government assistance and teaching them to help other
residents learn to use the technology. "Eighty-three
percent of them went on to get jobs elsewhere after
working for six months at a center."

As a result, the centers were immediately popular. In the
working-class village of Saint-François, for example, a
third of the area’s 1,500 people came out to give the
Internet a try, and the 34 computer stations at a local
school and public library were tied up 60 percent of the
time. In the first year, more than 250 people took online
courses.

In another area, Sussex Corner, Angie McNabb, an
out-of-work bookkeeper and mother of two, tried the
Internet for the first time and within a few months was
designing Web sites. She eventually landed a job with the
center as a computer instructor, and went on to start her
own bakery business, Angelina’s Fine Desserts, utilizing
cheesecake recipes she collected on the Internet. Her
success story is far more humble than that of, say, the
New Brunswick start-up companies that garnered lucrative
contracts from IBM. But it’s a sign that New Brunswick’s
HR efforts are reaching every level of the workforce. About
half of the 20,000 new technology jobs have been filled by
workers who were out of work or under-employed in
low-wage or part-time jobs.

Sustaining the progress
Though New Brunswick has achieved impressive success
in remaking its workforce and turning its economy around,
Weeks and other officials know that, given the frenetic
pace and increasing competitiveness of the global
economy, it’s dangerous to rest on one’s laurels. Under
the leadership of the province’s current premier, Bernard
Lord, who took office in 1999 at age 34, New Brunswick
has continued to work aggressively to create new jobs. As
the province’s training efforts continue to produce new
technology workers, the three-year-old Work-Ready
Workforce Initiative tracks current and future labor-market
needs and attempts to match employers and workers
through NBJobNet, an online database that contains
thousands of résumés and job openings.

New Brunswick’s HR high-tech training strategy actually
has spawned an entire new industry. There are now more
Internet users throughout the world who are taking courses
created in New Brunswick than there are people living in
the province. That may be the surest sign that New
Brunswick’s innovative approach is catching on.

Patrick J. Kiger is a freelance writer based in the
Washington, D.C. area.

http://www.workforce.com/section/00/feature/23/26/80/index.html