Hit 'em young and hit 'em often.
It's one of the recipes for creating tomorrow's tech leaders and creating a critical mass of technology and science enterprises in this part of the province, says Doug Robertson, president and CEO of Tech South East.
The not-for-profit group partners with the region's tech companies to grow the sector in the southeast of the province - including ensuring that today's students realize the fun and possibly lucrative careers that the sector provides those who emerge on graduation day with the skill sets the sector so badly craves.
"These are exciting technology jobs," Robertson says.
"They are high-paying jobs."
While Tech South East's outreach to young people focuses often on those in elementary school, it doesn't exclusively target them. "It's across the board, all the way from elementary to university," Sally Ng, Tech's community engagement and outreach co-ordinator says. Students with strong skills in science, engineering, math and technology are the industry's future. Ng uses the french-fry analogy to demonstrate that fostering those kinds of tech-oriented students begins at a most basic level. Ng will challenge students to cite the kinds of careers generated by a french fry, for example.
Typically, the responses include restaurant worker, production plant employee or farmer.
It falls to Ng to point out that the humble french fry also generates thousands of exciting jobs in technology and science, from growing a better potato to overseeing IT departments in everything from the big plants where french fries are made to the big trucking firms that haul such products - to cite just a few examples.
"Now, translate that to a phone, and how many jobs you can create with a phone," Ng says.
"Well, thousands of them, actually."
Tech South East is only a year old but they've already built a solid membership base of 85 companies and forged partnerships with educational institutions from local school districts to the region's community colleges to universities, as well as all three levels of government and the research sector, getting everyone on the same page towards accelerating the growth of innovation-based entrepreneurship and economic development.
They describe themselves as enablers for the ICT, health and life sciences sector.
Their outreach into the educational sector coincides with national Technology Week, which continues until Oct. 23.
Next week, about 240 grades 6 to 8 students will take part in a science discovery exercise with local volunteers and Science East, an organization that offers hands-on technology-based science exhibitions and shows geared to any age, but to youngsters in particular.
