Some 400 laid-off tech workers from across Ottawa gathered Tuesday to develop an action plan that will hopefully get them back to work.

The group converged on the Nepean Sportsplex for the Ottawa Talent Forum, an event organized by the Ottawa Talent Initiative. OTI comprises many peer networks of laid-off workers from the local high-tech community.

One of those workers is Richard Lefebvre, who is also on the OTI's organizing committee. He expected a lot of solid suggestions to come out of the event's many workshops, such as "how to generate income, how to generate jobs, and how to partner up talented people with employers that can't afford to hire them."

Lefebvre emphasized that the group favours creative ideas over telling the government "throw money" at the problem. There are strategic ways to spend public money that is allocated for retraining, he said. For example, many start-ups may need more people but can't afford to hire them. "So maybe take some of that money and invest it in partnerships where it's a win-win situation. People keep their skills up, small businesses can get labour, and everyone wins."

Cheryl Gorman, executive director of Talentworks, an organization within the Ottawa Centre for Research and Innovation (OCRI), agreed creative ideas would flow out of the event, some of which will be included in a community action plan expected to come out by the end of March.

All of the job creation strategies, however, will likely be indirect, she said. For example, managing fleet services electronically as opposed to manually "would provide some significant revenues for some startups working in that field," she said.

The next step for OTI is to gather all of the surveys filled out by the forum's participants. The surveys will allow OTI to create various profiles of attendees, and identify their different skill sets, said Lefebvre.

In identifying such skills, local employment services can better serve those who need them, said Gorman, adding a lot of people don't know what's out there.

And what is there isn't enough, she said. A lot of the programs around career transition are geared more toward entry-level job-seekers.

"So they need to be adjusted," she said. "And I think we're going to see a lot of specific career transition programs come out of (the action plan)."