Following cuts to its European operations, Nortel this summer will have about 44,000 full-time workers. To put this in perspective, the last time Nortel employed this few people was in 1984.
Again Nortel said, as it has been saying for months, that most of the cuts will come from the sale of non-core businesses and in Europe where regional labour laws slowed the staff reductions.
But since those cuts were supposed to have been completed in the last quarter, the targets are more likely elsewhere in the organization.
Nortel had repeatedly denied comments made anonymously by Nortel employees on online bulletin boards that scores of vice-presidents lost jobs recently and that product development in California, Florida and other centres is being chopped.
A recent training session run by Volunteer Service Overseas was half filled by current and former high-tech workers.
A report published last week by Research Vietnam revealed that big name North American companies are outsourcing to the country, along with European and Japanese players.
Nortel, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett Packard, British Aerospace, BP and Sony are just some of the names investing in Vietnam.
"We did not have any reservations about working with Vietnam-based developers since the country has a vast pool of intellectual resources that is largely untapped," said Hung Truong of Nortel.
By Andrea Mandel-Campbell Financial Post
Tundra Semiconductor Corp. recently conducted an innovative experiment that had nothing to do with making chips.
The Ottawa-based company placed a map of the world on the wall of its games room and asked its 200 employees to identify where they came from.
At last count, 23 nationalities from Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe were represented on the map. While many of Tundra's staff are Canadian citizens, a good number are new immigrants either recently arrived in Canada or sponsored by Tundra to fill a massive shortfall of skilled workers in the fast-growing information technology sector.
"It's simply impossible to recruit enough people from within Canada, so we're hiring them from outside," said Adam Chowaniec, Tundra's chief executive.
Technology officials at the event said the Ottawa technology industry's biggest challenge continues to be the number of qualified graduates being produced by local post-secondary institutions.
SiberCore Technologies chief executive Ken Schultz said finding the right graduates with know-how in the semiconductor and photonics industries is a problem now and will be worsened by an expected rebound in both of the sectors.
