Digital jobs to rise above 2.2M by 2025 — and many sectors look especially hot

Pandemic surge expected to continue

Employment in Canada’s digital economy “surged” during the pandemic even as the broader economy experienced mass layoffs and other economic impacts, according to a new report from the Information and Communications Technology Council.

Digital economy jobs, which ICTC defined as including all jobs in the tech sector and technology roles in all other sectors, jumped to more than 11 per cent of the country’s total employment from 9.5 per cent pre-pandemic.

“We’ve seen the crisis has been a bit of an opportunity,” said Akshay Kotak, a senior economist and research analyst at ICTC, and one of the co-authors of the report, in an interview.

Kotak attributed the growth to a combination of layoffs in the broader economy, which helped to boost the digital economy’s proportion of total employment, and genuine growth in the sector, which reached roughly two million jobs in 2020.

The pandemic forced businesses and consumers to adopt technology in a way that will stick around post-pandemic, and businesses in this segment of the economy successfully transitioned to remote work with no loss in productivity and, in many cases, increased revenue.

That trend is expected to continue, with ICTC projecting digital economy jobs will grow to reach 2.26 million jobs by 2025 — an increase of 250,000 additional positions. In that time frame, digital economy jobs are expected to grow at an annual rate of 2.22 per cent, as compared to 1.97 per cent in the broader economy.

Kotak said this will largely be driven by an increase of skilled tech workers across all sectors of the economy.

“This speaks to that trend we’re seeing, of increasing parts of the economy becoming digitalized,” he said. “With some of the changes to consumer behaviour and the channels that businesses reach their consumers that the pandemic has brought, more and more we expect tech workers across all sectors to drive the growth of the digital economy.”

The report also identified Canada’s fast-growing clean tech, health and biotech, advanced manufacturing, agri-food and food tech and interactive digital media sectors as “key innovation areas” that will outperform the rest of the non-digital economy in the next five years due to their adoption of digital technology, and are projected to grow their workforces by thousands of positions each by 2025.

Maryna Ivus, manager of labour market research and a report co-author, said the ICTC’S job projections for each sector are for positions that will require some amount of technological savvy, though may not be pure technology roles.

Energy sector trends and environmental commitments will drive the clean tech sector to roughly 352,000 jobs by 2025 and clean resources jobs to 185,000, up from a respective 311,000 and 171,000 currently, ICTC said. The country’s agri-food and food tech sector, meanwhile, is projected to grow to 683,000 jobs, from 634,000 currently, as the increasing global population drives demand for food and technologies such as robotics, artificial intelligence and big data continue to transform the agricultural sector.

WE’VE SEEN THE CRISIS HAS BEEN A BIT OF AN OPPORTUNITY.