Canadian Urban Institute

Attracting and retaining talent in a mobile world

Virtuocity is about generating community-led solutions that will help each community find ways to prosper, or maintain the prosperity they already enjoy. It is about creating a strategy that helps to attract and retain creative talent.

Why is it important for cities to attract creative, knowledgeable, and mobile talent?

It is increasingly accepted that cities are becoming the main drivers of economic wealth in countries around the world. In a global economy where creative and knowledgeable labour is increasingly mobile, and in a world where traditional industries are moving to developing countries, the need to maintain and attract knowledge industries and workers to Ontario’s cities is pressing. There is a well supported theory in economic geography which states that jobs locate where people choose to locate and that the type of people who locate in a community will affect the type of jobs. If this is in fact the case then finding a way to attract new creative talent to Ontario’s cities will prove to be vital for this province in the long run. There is, in fact, truth to the claim that jobs locate where a critical mass of talent exists. In Ontario we need look no further than the City of Waterloo, a hotspot of computer science and communications innovation driven by a large and well educated creative student population and the local universities. At the same time a university alone is obviously not enough to make a city thrive – after all, Hamilton’s world-renowned McMaster University draws a substantial number of students to the city each year, yet most opt to leave the community once their degree is conferred. Clearly, attracting and retaining the best talent is crucial to building successful cities in an era of increased global and regional competitiveness.

Many of Canada’s small and mid-sized communities are losing their creative talent to major urban centres. Most of the literature examining how the knowledge economy offers great potential for cities has been focused on large metropolitan areas exclusively and there is little work to describe a way forward for small and medium sized cities, especially those with an industrial or manufacturing heritage. Their economies have failed to adjust to the changing economic landscape that has been produced by globalization and the current economic crisis, yet these heritage-rich communities still have much to offer – strengths to build on. Cities in Ontario such as Sarnia, Windsor, and North Bay, are lagging in population growth and have weak or negative economic growth. Recent studies (including the recent study Ontario in the Creative Age by the Martin Prosperity Institute/Richard Florida and Kevin Stolarick) are pessimistic about economic growth outside the GTA and Ottawa.

Virtuocity assess the value of communities based on their own merits, seeking out strengths and other points of leverage on a community by community basis before making recommendations for investment or other change. Meanwhile successful cities, such as Waterloo, or turn-around cities like Brantford, will ideally continue to build on their strengths and create the conditions that will continue to attract and retain talent.

Each successful city has a set of unique attributes which relate closely to the city’s cultural and economic heritage. This means that the prospect to regenerate “failing” cities exists provided that the city’s heritage and culture are first well understood, and provided that a series of bold moves are taken to attract creative and knowledge workers.

The demographics of talent and creativity are not well understood in Canada.

While many Canadian cities have devised strategies for attracting talent, they are doing it in a relative vacuum of knowledge, with little understanding of the demographics of talent and creativity – why do people come to our city, and why do they leave? These pressing questions have only been examined broadly at a national or global level, not within local contexts and rarely at the regional scale. The social geography of talent has not been studied in a manner that can be applied directly to inform policy decisions.

The most mobile demographic consists of educated people between the ages of 25 and 34. This group of mobile, young talent is the most likely to move into, or leave a city based on its ability to provide the attributes which they see as contributing to quality of life. As the population of a given cohort ages into its late 30’s, those individuals become less mobile and rooted in their chosen city.
 

The bottom line is that a critical mass of talent is necessary for prosperity in the 21st Century and Canada’s cities need to be better equipped to determine how to best attract that talent. This is where Virtuocity can help.

Is Your Community Ready for Virtuocity?

Please contact Glenn Miller, Vice President, Education and Research, for more information.

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