Executive Summary

Machines are here to stay, and there’s no turning back. But technology doesn’t have to be a force that “happens” to us. When implemented in a way that centres workers and their efforts, coupled with skills training investment, technology and automation can augment and complement workers, not replace them.

Jobs that once required little to no digital skills are increasingly requiring workers to adopt them into their day-to-day work tasks. Production outputs, resource needs and labour patterns are perpetually changing, and these changes require new thinking on how we prepare Canadians for the future of work.

This report offers a comprehensive look into how technology has impacted jobs and workers in the last 15 years. This information is designed to serve as a tool to understand the projected impact of technology on worker outcomes in Canada to ensure that we get the best and avoid the worst of technology-driven innovation.

In our 2019 report, Who Are Canada’s Tech Workers, we developed an analytical framework to define technology workers. Now, we combine that framework with the National Occupational Classification (NOC). We use these to measure digital intensity and the rate of change in digital intensity across all occupations in Canada in the past 15 years, from 2006 to 2021. As the NOC lacks detailed data on the skills needed to perform each job, we use a crosswalk with the American equivalent, O*NETOnLine.

The results show that technology adoption has touched every single occupation in Canada—but differently. Our data supports global evidence that over the past 15 years, jobs requiring more routine tasks have overwhelmingly advanced in digital adoption as routine tasks were replaced with technology. But cloud computing, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), and big data are among the growing innovations in digital technology that are shifting the influence of digitalization to occupations that had previously been overwhelmingly non-routine.