When the former head of Google Canada addressed the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade in 2015, it was apparent he did not want to get anyone’s hopes up.
“Right now we’ve got offices in Toronto, we’ve got an engineering office in Kitchener-Waterloo, Montreal, we have people in Ottawa,” Sam Sebastian said when asked about the possibility of the tech giant launching an office in Vancouver. “Immediately, the plan is to continue to grow these areas, make sure that we aren’t growing [faster] than we can manage.”
So has anything changed now that “immediately” has passed and Sabrina Geremia has taken over as Google’s country director for Canada as of 2017?
“We have 1,100 employees across four offices, and those are largely in Ontario and Quebec,” Geremia told Business in Vancouver the day before delivering an address to the Canadian Club Vancouver on April 17. “We don’t have an office right now in Vancouver, but I can tell you my folks are out here every single week – nothing to announce right now, unfortunately.”
Geremia, who said she experiences “mountain envy” every time she visits Vancouver, was in town in mid-April visiting companies like Telus Corp. (TSX:T) and KPMG Canada.
While Google doesn’t have the same physical footprint in Vancouver as other U.S. tech giants like Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq:MSFT), Facebook Inc. (Nasdaq:FB) or Amazon.com Inc. (Nasdaq:AMZN), it’s been cultivating partnerships for years with high-profile West Coast companies. Lululemon Athletica Inc. (Nasdaq:LULU), Hootsuite Inc., e-commerce company Article.com and rail-tour provider Rocky Mountaineer are among the local businesses Geremia points to as big beneficiaries of Google’s ability to target potential customers through its extensive infrastructure.
Meanwhile, during her address to the Canadian Club, Geremia urged businesses to prioritize retraining their workers as technology continues to transform the nature of work. She said Canada can’t rely solely on colleges and universities to train the workforce.
She pointed to one of Google’s own initiatives that sent some of her team to Surrey to train businesses on digital tools.
The company is also launching what it calls its IT Cert program, in which Google employees train people with minimal experience, allowing them to become job-ready professionals in eight to 12 months. The team has already been assisting with training at Surrey Public Library.
“We know that digital transformation is happening, we know that that’s the way to global prosperity and we know that that’s happening across businesses in Canada,” Geremia told BIV. “We need to train Canadians to always be learning and to use the tools. It’s really just about supporting skills and training for the next generation of the workforce that’s going to be based in Vancouver.”
