Last week I posed the same question to two players in the New Brunswick tech industry, and got identical answers.

What, I asked both Barbara Ells of Tech South East and Larry Sampson of the New Brunswick Information Technology Council, was the biggest issue facing the tech segment in the province? Their answer: talent, or the lack thereof.

“The biggest issue here is talent,” Ells, the Manager of Programs and Member Relations for the tech enabling organisation, said in a meeting at her Moncton office on Thursday. “It’s mainly (an issue) on the IT side, but IT marketing skills, for example, are also in short supply and high demand.”

A day later I was on the phone with Sampson, the Chief Executive of the IT Council, discussing his organization’s superb new report on the industry, and he was singing the same song. If there is one thing that the segment needs, it’s talented people who can develop ideas and turn them into growing businesses.

“If you’ve got superior supply and superior quality of talent, they will generate superior ideas,”’ he said. “And if you get superior ideas, you will in time attract capital.”

New Brunswick Premier David Alward’s Advisory Council on Technology recently asked the council to prepare a report on the province’s IT sector with a view to formulating policy to help grow the industry. The 24-page report, "Growing the ICT Sector’’, was published last week and makes a range of recommendations designed to increase the talent pool of and channel capital into the IT industry. And though it relates specifically to New Brunswick itself, the report captures the IT challenges and opportunities that are common to all four Atlantic Provinces.

“New Brunswick as an economy is not leveraging ICT to its fullest,” says the report. “Our exports of ICT goods are less than one-third the national average, and the sector represents less than 4 percent of the Provincial GDP, a full 25 percent lower than nationally. Paradoxically, what this fundamentally represents is an opportunity.”

You can adjust the numbers as needed but the message remains the same for the entire region: we don’t have a large enough IT sector, and the problem is exacerbated by the fact that we have too little R&D, too few people and too little investment capital. And this is a problem because IT offers a huge opportunity for growth.

Even though Canada does not perform as well as its OECD peers, the Canadian IT sector nevertheless grows at twice the rate of the country’s overall economy, largely because it offers such strong export potential. The benefits of a strong IT sector also radiate through the entire economy, because it usually improves the productivity of other industries, buttressing competitiveness and creating jobs.

To grow this essential economic segment, the council urges government, industry and academia to work together in planning growth. It also wants reforms that would channel more money into R&D and young businesses, such as increasing the maximum Equity Tax Credit from 30 percent of the investment to 50 percent.

And it has concrete long- and short-term solutions to the lack of qualified IT professionals, including the retraining of people laid off in other industries, and increasing the number of secondary and post-secondary students studying information technology. And of course, it says we should try to retain the grads we do produce.

“The fundamental challenge facing New Brunswick in this regard is one of inadequate supply, caused by low graduation rates from ICT related degree and diploma programs, high levels of emigration, and low levels of immigration and attraction,” says the report. “While the ICT jobs here pay in the order of 28% more than the average job in New Brunswick, what will catch the eye of a student graduating from University, prospective immigrants, or workers from the rest of Canada is that they pay 20% less than the Canadian average.”

Sampson agreed in the interview that repopulating the IT talent pool is going to take time. His council’s report makes some great observations and recommendations on how to get the ball rolling.