Newly established Lambton DevShop designed to attract IT projects
SARNIA, December 6, 2021 – With the goal of securing economic sustainability and prosperity, both in the near and distant future, Sarnia-Lambton is currently exploring various opportunities for economic diversification.
Historically, the community focused on the energy and chemical sectors, and in more recent years, biochemical manufacturing. However, the region also has many advantages that could also enable diversification into the “high tech” sector including close proximity to the border, operation and living costs, and favourable exchange rates.
One of the most important contributing factors that would enable the community to transition into the high tech sector is access to a highly qualified workforce.
With this diversification in mind, Lambton College has established the Lambton DevShop platform. Designed earlier this year, the new platform was created to attract national and international Information Technology (IT) projects by providing industry connections to highly qualified researchers, graduate students, and active students in the IT sector. The goal of the DevShop is to provides critical access to existing talent while attracting motivated young professionals to complete development projects in collaboration with industrial partners. Many of the individuals currently involved in these projects are international students who hold engineering and other bachelor’s degrees and are enrolled in post graduate programs at Lambton College.
The Lambton DevShop provides industry access to students and graduates from various IT programs including Cloud Computing for Big Data, Embedded Systems Engineering Design, Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning, Computer Software and Database Management, and Cyber Security.
In the first six months of its pilot phase, Lambton College has already attracted projects from five Silicon Valley-based companies, resulting in the creation of 12 high quality developer jobs. Globally, the industry is experiencing a shortage of skilled professionals in this area, and positioning Lambton (and Canada) to fill that gap is one of the key drivers of the DevShop’s success to date.
“The DevShop is an excellent platform to create high quality jobs for newly graduated students, paid by national and international companies,” explains Mehdi Sheikhzadeh, Vice President, Research & Innovation, Lambton College. “It also helps to keep our talented, trained workforce in Canada.”
Based on the success of the DevShop to date, Lambton College is currently scaling operations in order to support more companies with their workforce needs, providing greater employment opportunities for their students and graduates, all while increasing the reputation of Sarnia-Lambton and Ontario as a place to conduct applied research.