I, Human: The digital and soft skills driving Canada’s labour market

Executive Summary

To illuminate the different combinations of skills that Canadians need to be competitive in the labor market, we have partnered with Burning Glass Technologies (Burning Glass) to examine job posting data from January 2012 to December 2018. This data covers all of the English-language online job postings in Canada and reflects the combination of skills that employers believe a candidate needs, providing a proxy for current skill demands in the labor market.

Using this data, we first sought to uncover the demand for digital skills in Canada. We propose a new robust measure of digital skills, allowing us to place digital skills on a continuum based on their relative digital intensity. Second, we identified a number of distinct clusters of digital skills, then examined how these clusters interact and appear together with similarly clustered non-digital skills. Finally, using these insights, we uncovered trends where employers are looking for distinct combinations of digital and non-digital skills — resulting in what we are calling hybrid jobs.

The purpose of this report is to analyze which skills are most in-demand and how skills from different domains go together, so job seekers can understand how to build on their existing skill sets to enhance their competitiveness in the labor market.