Hi my husband Neil has been a contact database analyst for the last twenty years and has worked for losts of telecomms and energy companies specialising in Oracle DBA and development (whatever that is ...).

We have just filled in our PR forms and are wondering if the contract IT market is in a good state in Canada, or should he be looking for a "permi" job?

Calgary or Toronto are our current favourites for landing and we would really like some feedback from all of you lovely people as to which might have the better work opportunities for him.

Thanking you all in advance.....


Cheers, Monica X

Hello Monica,

My own reasearch has led me to two good sites for jobs:

http://www.monster.com
and
http://www.workopolis.com

I think you will find that Ontario is the place with the most available/demand for jobs - but it's worth exploring both places.

Good Luck

Steve

Thanks Steve, for your reply and good luck to you too!

My guess is that Ottawa and Quebec City are the only markets that will sustain a contract Oracle DBA. Does he speak French? What did he do before Oracle?

Anyone who was with us in Brittany on holiday in May will vouch for me that my husband's grasp of French is pretty bad . Also, I hope to be working as an SLP (having only recently qualified), and so would prefer to do that in an english speaking area.

His career in IT started as a graduate trainee with ICL in Bracknell, moving on to contract work pretty much straight away. He has been working in Oracle for the last 15 years so there wasn't much before that!

Is it the case that the IT contract market is not as bouyant as it is in the UK?
Would you say that most people with his experience tend to work as permenant members of staff?

Any info will be very gratefully received.......thanks.

Yes. There's not the infra-structure in Canada to support a similar industry and here it's all who-you-know.

No, there are lots of contractors but we tend to work in the US or in the UK, often by VPN, it's only if you want to work exclusively in Canada that there's a real problem.

More later.

Can't help in the IT stuff...dbd's your man. Just curious, what's an SLP?

I think Oracle contractors in Canada are most likely to be employed by the government, the banks or in the oil and gas sector. Government is big in Ottawa and Quebec City, finance in Toronto and resources in Calgary.

Contractors in Canada face a couple of problems their equivalents in the UK do not. Firstly Canada doesn't have as many people or as big an economy as the UK so there are less jobs. Secondly much of the economy is "branch plant", big employers around here were Ford GM and Chrysler, they're now being replaced by Honda and Toyota but neither US nor Japanese firms need to develop computer systems at remote manufacturing facilities. I suspect this is an issue with oil and gas and that much of the computing for Alberta is done in Houston or Denver (or in India but outsourced from Houston or Denver).

I don't know much about banks or oil and gas but I "hold the paper" for a fair number of government contracts. This is a sleazy business. The way it works is that someone finds a contract, often by drinking at the CSRA ("the rah"). The manager and contractor reach an informal agreement that the contract person should do the job. The manager can only engage the person through an approved supplier so the contractor shops the job around the suppliers on the government's list. The suppliers agree to represent the contractor for some cut of the rate, usually just a few percent, and the contractor picks whichever one looks best. Note that few firms will factor the receivables and they'll want 60+% of the rate for doing so. This is because the government is awful at paying bills, it is common not to be paid for a year and our longest outstanding non-disputed invoice is now over five years old. (At one point we had to have a DB2 DBA find a new pimp because the rate was very high, we were factoring part of the billing (so he could eat), and we weren't paid for two years; we just ran out of cash flow).

The circumstances of government contracts coming about is typically that a person has been hired into a position for reasons other than competence and a contractor is needed to do the actual work. It takes a certain type of person to take on that type of contract because they're not about getting a specific piece of work done but shadowing someone who has a maintenance role. otoh, once started, they do tend to run for a long while, I've had one such contract, part-time, since 1986 and another since the early 90s.

I see telecomms mentioned, the computers for Rogers are in Toronto. Rogers uses some contractors (mainly DB2/UDB but they may also have some Oracle). That is not renowned as a good place to work.

SLP= Speech and Language Pathologist in Canada.....translates to Speech and Language Therapist in UK.

I like the sound of the Canadian one as it makes me sound much more intelligent .

Thanks DBD for the detailed and very informative reply.

Gives us lots to mull over as we wait for PR.

The scenario re payment is not a shock to us but in the UK we get around that by using an agency who pay us monthly and bill the customer direct (for a cut - of course! ).

Are there such agencies in Canada or should he simply contact monster et al?

There are such agencies. In my post I refer to them as "suppliers" and "pimps". I called paying monthly and taking a cut for doing so "factoring the receivables".

I think that, in your husband's position, I'd first contact Oracle directly as they use a lot of people on a contract basis for work at client's sites. Be warned though that it's usual to expect contractors to commute weekly to wherever the job may be. A mate of mine who's sub-sub-contracted through them has been commuting weekly to LA (from Northern Virgina) for nearly three years.

Sorry for missing the sub text, have just had six hours of lectures and my brain is officially full!

Thanks again for the insight to the market - where would we be without you?

Nowhere very different, but do try giving Oracle a shout, they're at:

Oracle Corporation Canada Inc
100-110 Matheson Boulevard West
Mississauga, ON L5R 3P4
(905) 890-8100

Try:

http://www.sisystems.com

http://www.finney-taylor.com

They're both good outfits.

There's a ton of work out here for the right people ... don't accept that TO is the centre of the universe.

Although ... as we all know, the centre of the universe probably contains a super massive black hole ... so the claim isn't completely without a grain of truth.

Best of luck with job seeking

Some sort of chip on shoulder there? There's no previous suggestion that all the work is in Toronto.