VANCOUVER — With New Brunswick’s working-age population in decline, Keith McIntosh, the chief executive officer of Fredericton-based PQA Testing, has sometimes struggled to find people to work at the software-testing company. In 2015, the entrepreneur attended the Governor General’s Canadian Leadership Conference, and listened as participants discussed Indigenous issues. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission had released part of its report, and its recommendations included giving Indigenous people “equitable access to jobs, training and education opportunities in the corporate sector.” McIntosh left the conference with a plan: to create a new company to train Indigenous people to work as software testers, and to guarantee them a job upon graduation.

Plato Testing, a company that trains First Nations and Métis people and Inuit across Canada, launched later that year. “We thought we could maybe do something to sort of try and help both parties at the same time,” said McIntosh.

The company has since trained about 200 Indigenous people, running courses in New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan, Alberta and B.C. It’s currently recruiting students in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., and will soon offer a course in Victoria for the first time, partnering with the provincial government, Métis Nation British Columbia and Deloitte Canada to do so.

Each course includes in-class work and real-world experience through an internship, lasting up to 16 weeks. Students spend five months in classes—though that was shorter in earlier iterations of the program—and learn different methodologies, as well as soft skills, like giving constructive feedback. “When our folks come out of the training program, they’re probably some of the best-trained junior software testers anywhere in Canada,” said Denis Carignan, Plato Testing’s president. Each graduate is offered a job at Plato or at its sister company, Plato Sask Testing. Plato’s software testers will often work with those at McIntosh’s other company, PQA, on large projects.

Carignan, a member of the Pasqua First Nation in Saskatchewan, remembers McIntosh proposing the pie-in-the-sky idea at that 2015 conference. “It was a long day. And I think I muttered something like, ‘Great idea, Keith. You build that company, I’ll come work for you.’”

That September, McIntosh contacted Carignan, who was working as a public servant in the federal department of Indigenous Affairs, saying he and a group of others had created a curriculum and PQA had provided the funding needed to get a training program underway. A dozen students had started the course about a week prior, and McIntosh wanted Carignan to lead the new company. Carignan spent much of his career working in government, and admits he wasn’t used to ideas materializing that quickly. He joined the company in the summer of 2016, shortly after the inaugural class graduated. Now, he says, “I get to get up every day and be part of something that is making a real difference in people’s lives.”

Plato’s refined its approach in the years since, and has worked to get better at removing barriers to participation. “It’s not one problem. It’s literally like peeling an onion. There’s layer after layer,” said McIntosh, noting Indigenous communities face specific regional difficulties, such as poor internet access in rural areas.

Shawnee Polchis, a Wolastoq woman living in New Brunswick, started taking one of Plato’s courses in October 2016. She had completed one year of college, where she pursued fine arts, and was working at an erratic schedule at a call centre for around minimum wage. She didn’t know at the time what a software tester did—asked during her interview, she answered, “testing of software”—but the course taught her everything she needed to know. When she finished her classes and internship, Polchis started a job with Plato, with a consistent 40-hour workweek and a roughly $10,000 annual salary bump over her call-centre wage. 

“It’s not only just the actual work we do,” said Polchis, who has since risen in the ranks to become a lead software tester, managing a team of several people. “It’s the community we’ve built.” She has felt supported by her supervisors to pursue more education and enjoyed spending time around other Indigenous people, giving her the ability to learn more about her culture, something she feels she somewhat missed out on during her childhood. 

Plato has asked her to represent the company at elementary, high school and post-secondary events, where she encourages young girls to consider careers in science, technology, engineering and math fields. “Yes, I get to do the software testing and it’s Monday through Friday, a scheduled job,” she said. “But I also have all these opportunities to be able to influence other people to make good choices.”

The social impact is partly what drew Carignan to Plato, but he also sees the potential for the company to help fix the tech talent shortage in Canada. The company wants to employ 1,000 software testers across Canada, said Carignan; so far it has employed up to 75 Indigenous testers at a time.

In order to accomplish its goals, Plato needed backing. “We can’t just do it organically all the time,” said Carignan. In January, it announced a $500,000 investment—its first—from Raven Indigenous Capital Partners. Once Plato reaches the 1,000-tester threshold, said McIntosh, it will have the size to bid on jobs for which it currently doesn’t have the human resources to handle. It was on track to do that before COVID-19, he said, but the pandemic slowed things down.

McIntosh’s ultimate goal is for Plato to grow large enough to purchase his other company, PQA. “Then rather than PQA winning the projects and bringing Plato in, Plato would buy PQA and PQA would become a division of Plato,” he said. “So the non-Indigenous team would become a division of the Indigenous company.”