Hamid Rahbar. (Darren Brown, OBJ)

Just when everyone thought it was dead, the Ottawa Talent Initiative (OTI) is staging a comeback.

Details are still being worked out, but officials at Vitesse Reskilling Canada Inc., an Ottawa-based not-for-profit organization specializing in retraining unemployed or underemployed high-tech workers, is hoping to improve upon and retain some of OTI's better-known services.

In fact, Vitesse in the midst of a move into OTI's current digs in the Kanata Research Park. After all, it's paying the rent.

OTI began as an informal support group in the middle of Ottawa's tech bust in 2001. With thousands of tech workers finding themselves with pink slips and bleak futures, some banded together to network and help each other find work, forming the groundwork for the initiative.

Eventually, the group developed a solid enough reputation to qualify for operational funding from various levels of government, allowing it to open the "OTI Action Centre" in 2004 at the Kanata Research Park and hire full-time staffers, including Gary Davis as executive director.

However, over the last 12 months, with the economy on seemingly solid ground, Queen's Park hinted at the eventual end of its financial support for OTI. Money continued to sputter in, but after the Liberals won their second majority, Queen's Park confirmed that OTI would be flying solo. OTI finally closed its doors on March 31.

Or so most residents believed. Enter Hamid Rahbar.

Earlier this month, the Vitesse president was appointed president of OTI by OTI's board of directors, a potential first step in the absorption of OTI's services under Vitesse's umbrella.

Mr. Rahbar said he entered the picture upon hearing that OTI's funding was gone.

"There is still lots of value in OTI," said Mr. Rahbar. He specifically referred to OTI's extensive database of resumes, its connections to more than 500 tech companies in the region, as well as certain programs and task forces that unemployed tech workers find valuable.

Details on what will happen to the programs are still scarce. However, Mr. Rahbar said some of the popular task forces will continue and be strengthened. Others, he said, will end or get modified.

"We will try to keep as many services as possible, and enhance them," he said.

"(But) some of the services are not valuable . . . if we transform them, maybe we can create more value."

Vitesse Reskilling was originally formed as a partnership between Ottawa's two universities and the National Research Council in the late '90s to train science and engineering grads for work in emerging sectors such as photonics and bioinformatics, said its first president, current Enablence boss Arvind Chhatbar.

"I think as the tech boom ceased to boom, we discovered that there were other things the same workers could do," he said. "We also helped highly qualified new immigrants, because their qualifications did not necessarily have all the requirements a Canadian company would be looking for."

Mr. Chhatbar agreed with Mr. Rahbar that there are advantages in uniting the two groups in a city the size of Ottawa. He said the reason the two groups didn't unite sooner was because they had different sources of funding.

"That always causes issues," he said. Initially supported by Queen's Park, Vitesse became self-sustaining, relying on those who enrolled in its programs to pay for or sponsor them.

"(Ottawa) doesn't need two entities. All of the programs that OTI has could, in fact, fit into Vitesse," said Mr. Chhatbar, who remained president at Vitesse until 2007.

"There are clear linkages," he said. "We co-operated on many programs, because (OTI) had a similar approach."

Mr. Rahbar's appointment was announced by Kanata North Coun. Marianne Wilkinson, who currently sits as the chair of OTI's board. She said with OTI completely cut off from provincial funding, it needed someone to pay the bills, and luckily, Vitesse was interested.

"Vitesse does similar work to what we were doing," she said. "What matters is that he (Mr. Rahbar) has kept on our task forces. These are all volunteers that are working on various things with businesses. There are still a couple of terminals that people can come in and use, and there's still some space where they can do some meetings."

Currently, OTI's doors remain closed. However, Vitesse is in the midst of moving its own office a block or so down Terry Fox Drive into OTI's digs. Once that's done, OTI will reopen, said Mr. Rahbar.

Coun. Wilkinson said OTI was extremely good at what it used to do, and said that with Vitesse's help, that work will continue.

"OTI still exists," she said. "We have our own board of directors. We have hired Hamid, for $1 a year basically, to operate OTI until we can get some grants coming in."

The future of OTI's last remaining staffer, operations manager Linda Last, is still being worked out.

"She's now working for me part time until she finds another job," said the councillor. "I'm still trying to get some funding for OTI, because then we would keep her on. Her heart is (with OTI)."

Combined, the two groups form a natural partnership, said Mr. Rahbar, with Vitesse's strengths in training and OTI's expertise in job placement.

"Our focus is in the synergy of both organizations and transformation of the OTI towards self-sustainability, and creating more value through more and transformed services."

Gary Davis, executive director of the OTI from June 2004 until its provincial funding dried up recently, said he could not comment on the apparent resurrection of the organization.

But he said in today's job scene, where "few people are going to work long in one company," it made sense to have a strong support network for the especially volatile high-tech sector.