International Conference on Immigration, Integration and Inclusion (c4i) Quebec city, Hôtel Pur, May 31st – June 3rd, 2015 Call for submissions Skills in the IT (Information Technology) Sector: Main Issues and Practices surrounding the Immigrants’ Contribution In many regional and national IT (Information Technology) sectors, corporations and other related organizations rely on immigration to fill their needs for specialized skills. These needs are often expressed in job posts using expressions that are believed to fit with the market and are supposedly based on widely shared skills categories. The same applies with private or governmental tendering processes. Furthermore, to recruit high-requested IT candidates typically requires searching outside the corporation, and the jurisdiction where it is based. How can a fit be established between expressed needs and skills offer borne by foreign-trained professionals (FTPs)? Many destinies are at stake. At the organizational level, will corporations succeed in attracting good candidates through asking for wellidentified skills? At the institutional level, how will training institutions, both local and foreign, succeed in matching different job-demanding stakeholders to adapt programs to needs too often expressed in dissimilar skills categories? And what about offering training to FTPs bearing skills named, and even developed, differently? Finally, at the individual level, how can one progress in their career by obtaining sufficient and necessary skills (with an emphasis on recognition of skill levels)? These questions call for the idea of a common reference system or a competency framework used by all in a given territory. Europeans are working on interesting initiatives in this regard to foster international mobility of IT specialists. This symposium represents an opportunity to review an issue facing the various actors of a regional, national even international IT sector – employers, FTPs and their representatives, training institutions, economic development corporations, etc. To deal with a concrete case, actors from all the IT sector of the Québec region are invited to participate. International contributions (scientists or experts working on skills in IT, advisors from different levels of governments) are especially welcomed to give a new or different perspective, or present solutions that work or are in a trial. Relevant contributions will address the following issues:      What are the main problems met regarding skills in recruiting foreign candidates? What about soft skills expected in a culturally distinct work environment? How relevant are updating trainings offered locally to immigrants taking the plunge into the IT sector? Once their program is finished (with a local diploma in hand), how do they insert the work market? What place is taking skills in IT calls for tender, especially those that could be filled by FTPs and imply an international recruiting process? More fundamentally, how should skills (or competencies) be defined to embrace individual situations, organizational competencies and economic sectors?   How can a common reference framework be elaborated to gather disparate actors? Who should take the lead to assemble skills reference systems? What role should be played by legislation? Symposium will take place during the International Conference on Immigration, Integration and Inclusion (C4i), on June 2nd and 3rd, 2015, at Hôtel PUR, Québec City. On June 1st, in the evening, an opening activity will present actors personally involved in the social and professional inclusion of foreign IT specialists. Instructions to Contributors Proposal summary (Word format, Times Roman 12 pt) will not exceed 2500 characters, and include:    Name, first name, title, reporting organization, email Title and summary of the contribution Proposals summary should be sent at: [email protected] The 2015-C4i Congress is sponsored by the Industrial Relations Review, which will publish at fall 2016 a special issue on the socioprofessionnal integration of migrants. This issue will include a selection of the best articles chosen by a special editorial committee and respecting the publication criteria of the journal. These criteria are detailed at: http://www.riir.ulaval.ca/regles.asp?var=EN. Deadlines  March 23rd 2015: deadline for sending a summary (no longer than 2500 characters)  March 28th 2015: participants notified of acceptance to C4i  Mai 30th 2015: deadline to submit final papers, indicating intent to submit for publication in Relations industrielles / Industrial Relations or in the Congress proceedings  May 15th, 2015: deadline to submit final PowerPoint (or pdf, Keynote) presentations For further information and registration, please visit our website http://c4i.sbsn-conf.com/ Symposium organized with the Institute for Information Technologies and Societies (IITS), Université Laval