About this Report

This report closely examines tech workers across Canada and seeks to shed light on Canada’s tech occupations and the diversity and equity within them. Adding almost 200,000 new jobs since 2016, Canada’s highly-skilled tech workers are becoming a major component of Canada’s workforce. Using brand new methodologies and powerful data visualizations, Who are Canada’s Tech Workers? looks to provide a clear and concise resource for anyone looking to learn more about Canada’s tech talent and its growing impact on our economy.

Read this report to help you:

Gain new insight into who Canada’s tech workers are, where they work, and what they earn.
Better understand the level of diversity in Canada’s tech workforce.
Identify where Canada’s tech talent is situated and how it is changing.
Learn more about which groups remain underrepresented in tech.
Map out the latest and most relevant trends in Canada’s tech talent.

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Key findings from the report:

In 2016, one million Canadians worked in tech occupations.
Between 2006 and 2016, 183,000 workers joined Canada’s tech workforce.
The five cities with the largest number of tech workers were Toronto (238,000), Montréal (140,000), Vancouver (82,000), Ottawa (69,000), and Calgary (63,000).
While Canada’s tech workforce is diverse, pay and participation in tech jobs are unequal across many demographic lines. 32.5 percent of tech workers are immigrants, 31.9 percent identify as a visible minority. However, only 20 percent are women and only 1.2 percent identify as Indigenous.
Men were found to be four times more likely than women to work in a tech job.
There is also a stark pay gap between men and women in the tech sector, with women earning on average $7,300 less than their male counterparts. These gaps persist across many demographic intersections, including for women who belong to visible minority groups or who are immigrants.

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Who are Canada’s Tech Workers?

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Methodology

To clearly define the dominant skills that workers use across different parts of the tech sector and expand upon the methodology used in the State of Canada’s Tech Sector, 2016 report, we use the US Department of Labour’s O*NET database to identify the skill content of different occupations.

We have taken a bottom-up, skills-based approach to identifying tech occupations, which in turn allows us to identify the tech industries that make up Canada’s tech sector. This is a dynamic approach, which allows these definitions to evolve as technology, skills, occupations and industries evolve.

To reach our tech occupations definition, we analyzed the skills involved in different jobs. Using the O*NET database to Canada’s National Occupational Classification (NOC), we selected six skills used by O*NET that clearly relate to the production or use of technology: Interacting with Computers, Computers and Electronics, Engineering Design, Engineering and Technology, Programming, and Telecommunications. We then applied this definition to comprehensive data gathered from the 2016 Canadian Census to understand the number, participation, pay, and demographics of these tech workers.

Zeroing in on talent for supercomputing

We are able to translate insights from Who Are Canada’s Tech Workers? for different sectors and geographies across Canada, to inform the tech talent strategies of partner organizations. For example, we worked with Compute Ontario to produce Who Are Ontario’s Highly Qualified Personnel?, a study that provides insights on tech talent specific to supercomputing.