Developers, IT managers, consultants, nonprofit tech leads, enterprise architects, sales professionals — roughly 30 of them, gathered in a space at RRC Polytech on a Wednesday afternoon for an event that didn’t have a headline speaker or a product demo. What it had was six questions, a pile of Lego, and an honest conversation about what Manitoba’s tech workforce is actually missing.
I sat in on it. I’m still thinking about what I heard.
The event was organized by RRC Polytech’s School of Continuing Education in partnership with Tech Manitoba, and the goal was straightforward but ambitious: ask the people working inside Manitoba’s tech sector what skills are missing, what tools their teams struggle with, and what the industry needs from education over the next five to ten years. No packaged solution was brought in. No pre-written curriculum was pitched. Just industry, in a room, telling the truth.
The land acknowledgement at the start set an unexpected tone. Anderson, chair of professional studies, reminded the room — full of tech leaders — that the technology they design, deploy, and profit from has real environmental consequences. She asked them to think about what their choices today will mean for the next seven generations. It wasn’t what anyone expected to hear at a workforce development session. It’s what the conversation needed.
Here’s what the rest of the afternoon produced.
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The skills everyone listed — and the ones that actually matter
When the first question went up — what skills do you and your staff most need to strengthen? — every table produced a list that looked roughly the same. Communication. Adaptability. Critical thinking. Problem solving. Collaboration. Social awareness. Analytical skills. AI literacy. Leadership. Presentation skills.
Good list. Entirely Googleable. Which is exactly what one participant pointed out.
“If we just list stuff, you could Google it and get the same answer,” he said. “What I want is perspective. Which of these is actually the most important to you?”
That’s when the conversation got interesting.
One person said adaptability — without hesitation. Another said entrepreneurship. A third said resourcefulness. Not a skill you’ll find on most curriculum frameworks, but the word that kept coming back throughout the afternoon in different forms: the ability to find a way to get something done even when you don’t know how, to bring in the right people, to not just do your job description but actually solve the problem.
The people I value most on my team are resourceful. They may not be able to do it themselves — but they’ll find a way to get it done. Whether they bring other people in, or whatever. That’s the person I want.
— INDUSTRY PARTICIPANT, RRC POLYTECH WORKFORCE SESSION 2025
One participant who works in nonprofit IT put it another way: improvise, adapt, overcome. He said those three things, taken together, describe the mindset he wishes more people coming out of tech programs actually had. Not just knowing the right answer when everything goes right — but knowing what to do when it doesn’t. Which, in his experience, is most of the time.
The skills gap nobody puts on a resume
The second question — what essential skills are currently missing and difficult to train locally — produced a more honest list. And a more uncomfortable one.
The room talked about AI literacy, advanced data analysis, cybersecurity, ERP systems, cloud platforms. Those are the expected answers. But the conversation kept drifting back to something harder to name and harder to teach: the ability to translate technical knowledge into business value.
Multiple people around the room described the same situation. You have someone who is technically excellent — they know the systems, they can do the work — but they can’t communicate what they’re doing to a non-technical stakeholder. They can’t connect the code to the business problem. They speak in zeros and ones, and everyone else in the room is speaking English.
One enterprise architect described the deeper version of this problem. Organizations, she said, often suffer because the people sponsoring projects don’t know how to properly define a problem. They romance the solution. They hand it to the solution architects, who build exactly what they were asked for — and then everyone wonders why the same problem still exists. It’s not an IT failure. It’s a root cause analysis failure. And it starts well before the first line of code.
The fix she proposed was practical: bring business people and RRC students into the same room to work on root cause analysis together — not as a theory exercise, but as a real problem. Have them learn the methodology side by side. That, she said, would do more for the gap between education and industry than almost anything else.
The tools everyone uses and almost nobody uses well
Question three asked what tools and technologies teams struggle to use consistently. The answers were less about exotic technology than anyone expected.
Microsoft Teams. SharePoint. CRM platforms. ERP systems. Email. Password managers. Collaboration tools that everyone has access to and almost no one uses the same way.
SharePoint came up at nearly every table. Not as a technology people can’t access — but as a technology people use in ten different ways with no shared standard, no clear file organization, no version control, no ownership rules. The result is a digital filing cabinet that no one can navigate, full of documents that no one can find.
The bigger pattern, though, was about inconsistency across skill levels. One participant described it clearly: in any given organization, you have people who seem like computer wizards — they discovered every shortcut, every feature, every integration — and people who can barely send an email. And there’s no way to tell from a resume which one you’re getting. No standard. No baseline. Just hope.
It’s not that people can’t access the tools. It’s that everyone uses them differently. You get someone who comes in and they avoid the tool entirely because they’re embarrassed they don’t know how to use it. And the problem just gets worse.
— INDUSTRY PARTICIPANT, RRC POLYTECH WORKFORCE SESSION 2025
AI tools came up here too, but not in the way most conversations frame it. The concern wasn’t about people refusing to adopt AI. It was about people adopting it wrong — using it to generate things they can’t evaluate, submitting AI-written work they can’t actually defend, or implementing AI just to say they have it without a single real use case identified. One participant put it plainly: the problem isn’t fear of AI. It’s that companies don’t actually know what problem they’re trying to solve with it.
What’s actually creating inefficiency — and it’s not what you think
Question four asked about inefficiency. The room expected to talk about manual processes and outdated systems. And they did. But the loudest theme was something else entirely: communication breakdown.
Unnecessary meetings. Reply-all emails. People sending five-paragraph emails about things that could be resolved in a thirty-second conversation. Teams bypassing ticketing systems and workflow tools because the process feels too slow, creating chaos in the short term and data black holes in the long term.
One participant made a point that stayed with me. He said the problem isn’t that people are inefficient — it’s that the systems are designed in ways that make inefficiency inevitable. Manual work, unclear processes, and the wrong communication tools don’t just waste time. They create a kind of learned helplessness where people stop trusting the systems and start working around them. And once that culture sets in, it’s very hard to fix.
Several participants pointed to documentation as the single most undervalued skill in the tech workforce. Not glamorous. Not discussed in most curriculum. But the ability to document what you did — clearly enough that someone else (or future you, six months from now) can understand it — came up at almost every table as something critically missing.
The skills grid: what Manitoba’s industry actually needs right now
Across six questions and 30+ professionals, here are the skills that came up most consistently — ranked by how many tables raised them independently:
The next 10 years: what Manitoba’s tech sector is actually afraid of
The final question asked about emerging technology over the next five to ten years. The answers were honest in a way that most industry forecasting isn’t.
Yes, AI was mentioned. Yes, automation. But the fear underneath those words was more specific: that companies will keep implementing AI because their competitors are, without any actual use case identified, and end up with a workforce that’s working faster and producing more — but with less judgment applied to any of it. One participant described being the bottleneck on her own team because AI made everyone else faster. The output went up. Her ability to review it didn’t.
The concern about junior roles came up here too. If AI is replacing entry-level tasks — and several participants confirmed it already is at their organizations — then how does the next generation of developers build the experience needed to become senior developers? How do you grow without the reps? Nobody had a clean answer.
One participant raised something that I haven’t heard framed quite this way before. Manitoba, he said, has a massive opportunity in career awareness — specifically, helping people outside the traditional tech pipeline see that tech careers exist in agriculture, in construction, in healthcare, in nonprofits. Not just in tech companies. The farmer’s kids who have been running complex machinery their whole lives are already doing technology. They just don’t know they qualify.
Those grandparents out in rural Manitoba who are MacGyvering parts together on equipment — that’s technology. That’s problem solving. That’s resourcefulness. We just never told them it counts.
— INDUSTRY PARTICIPANT, RRC POLYTECH WORKFORCE SESSION 2025
That reframing felt like the most important thing said all afternoon. Manitoba’s tech workforce gap isn’t just a curriculum problem. It’s a perception problem. And fixing the perception — starting early, starting in schools, starting in rural communities — might do more for the pipeline than any course redesign.
I left the RRC Polytech building thinking about a 2.5-year-old who already knows what ChatGPT is. One participant mentioned her daughter, barely old enough to form full sentences, telling her mom to “ask ChatGPT” when she had a question. The room laughed. And then sat with it.
That child is entering a workforce in roughly 20 years. The skills she’ll need to succeed in it — critical thinking, adaptability, the ability to evaluate AI output rather than just accept it, the judgment to know when technology is solving the right problem — are not going to be built by giving her better tools. They’re going to be built by teaching her how to think.
That’s what the room kept coming back to, in different words, from different industries, across six questions and three hours. Not better software. Not more certifications. Just people who know how to think when things go wrong — because things always go wrong.
The Manitoba tech workforce skills gap won’t be closed by better software or more certifications. Manitoba’s tech sector doesn’t have a talent shortage. It has a thinking shortage. And RRC Polytech, apparently, is paying attention.
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What people ask about this event and topic
[jnews_faq faqStyle=”style-1″ elementId=”jnews_1772160843704_ut1nabp7″][faq_item question=”What is RRC Polytech’s School of Continuing Education and what do they offer?”]
RRC Polytech’s School of Continuing Education provides flexible, part-time upskilling, cross-skilling, and reskilling programs for working professionals across Manitoba. Unlike full-time degree programs, continuing education courses are designed to fit around existing jobs and schedules — offered evenings, weekends, online, and in hybrid formats. The school works directly with industry to identify skills gaps and build curriculum that reflects what employers actually need, not just what looks good in a calendar. If you’re a Manitoba tech professional looking to upgrade specific skills, their website is the right first stop.
[/faq_item][faq_item question=”What is Tech Manitoba and what role do they play in the province’s tech workforce?”]
Tech Manitoba is a nonprofit sector council that supports the growth and development of Manitoba’s technology industry. They conduct annual workforce surveys, advocate for the tech sector, and work on connecting education and industry — so that curriculum stays relevant and graduates are prepared for real jobs. The “Designing Manitoba’s Tech Workforce” session was co-organized with Tech Manitoba, and their annual survey data consistently flags post-secondary tech curriculum as one of the top areas needing improvement. They are the closest thing Manitoba has to a dedicated voice for the tech sector as a whole.
[/faq_item][faq_item question=”What are the biggest tech skills gaps in Manitoba right now?”]
Based on what industry professionals said at this session, the most significant gaps are not narrowly technical. Critical thinking and root cause analysis topped the list — the ability to define the right problem, not just build the first solution that comes to mind. Close behind: the ability to translate technical work into business value, adaptability and growth mindset, and AI literacy that goes beyond basic tool use to include ethics, privacy, and limitations. Tool-specific gaps include ERP systems, SharePoint, CRM platforms, and collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams — not because people can’t access them, but because there’s no consistent standard for how they’re used across organizations.
[/faq_item][faq_item question=”Is AI really replacing entry-level tech jobs in Manitoba?”]
Several participants at the session confirmed that AI is already affecting junior hiring at their organizations — not always through layoffs, but through reduced hiring. Efficiencies found through AI tools mean some companies need fewer junior-level staff for certain tasks. The concern raised in the room was longer-term: if entry-level roles shrink, how does the next generation of developers build the experience they need to grow into senior roles? There is no clean answer yet, but the consensus was that the solution is not to avoid AI — it’s to make sure that learning to evaluate, question, and direct AI output becomes a core skill from day one of any tech education program.
[/faq_item][faq_item question=”What does “upskilling vs reskilling vs cross-skilling” actually mean?”]
These three terms were defined clearly at the session by Brad from RRC Polytech’s School of Continuing Education. Upskilling means deepening expertise in your current role — learning new tools or skills that enhance what you already do. Cross-skilling means moving horizontally within an industry — building capabilities in a related area while staying in the same general field. Reskilling means a more significant transition — learning an entirely new set of skills to move into a different industry or role altogether. All three are valid paths, and RRC’s continuing education programs are designed to support all three depending on where someone is in their career.
[/faq_item][/jnews_faq]
💬 Are you a Manitoba tech worker, student, or employer? Which skill gap on this list hits closest to home for you — and what do you think education is still getting wrong?