Frequently Asked Questions
About the Canadian Job Trends Dashboard
The Canadian Job Trends Dashboard (CJTD) is an interactive tool that helps users explore job posting trends across Canada using job posting data from Lightcast. It provides regional and occupational insights to support understanding of labour market signals and trends.
The CJTD supports a range of audiences, including career development practitioners, policy and program stakeholders, post-secondary institutions and training providers, and researchers.
The CJTD is designed as a flexible, public-facing resource for a wide range of audiences.
The CJTD can be used to explore which types of jobs are being posted, where job-posting activity is concentrated, and which skills, credentials, and experience levels are commonly referenced in postings. It is designed to support orientation and context-setting.
Creating an account helps us manage access to the dashboard and understand how the tool is used overall. This information supports system performance, reliability, and ongoing improvements. We do not save individual searches or past queries.
About the data
Job posting data used in the CJTD is sourced from Lightcast, a third-party job posting data provider.
As with all data sources, there are caveats and limitations-some unavoidable structural limitations remain:
- Differences between OJP and job vacancies: An online job posting is not a job vacancy. A job vacancy is a labour market metric that is measured and validated to allow for representative statistical analyses. OJP do not capture all job openings as they only represent jobs posted online. Additionally, OJP are neither weighted to be representative, nor validated or constructed like job vacancies. In other words, OJP and job vacancies are not the same, but they complement each other. Some job openings are filled through informal methods like networking or word of mouth rather than being posted online, and a single job posting may represent multiple vacancies, further skewing the gap. These factors introduce variability across job types. For instance, professional and service-sector positions are likely to be overrepresented, while trades and manual-labour positions are likely to be underrepresented, as identified in a 2020 LMIC study
- Omitted requirements: Some occupations have assumed requirements that are not explicitly stated in all postings. For example, a chef job posting may not list "knowledge of cooking techniques" as a requirement because it is assumed for the occupation. These omissions can change the level of co-occurrence between certain terms, reducing their importance in our results.
- Data cleaning limitations: Once scraped, OJP data is cleaned and prepared for further use by Lightcast. Part of this cleaning process involves aligning online job postings with National Occupation Classification (NOC) codes using an algorithm. However, approximately 15% of postings cannot be mapped to a NOC code due to:
- No clear equivalent under the NOC system.
- Broad or ambiguous job titles and descriptions that prevent precise classification under the NOC standard
The data in this dashboard can help provide a view of demand from a high-level overview to a very detailed view. The taxonomies that are used in this dashboard include the following granularity:
- Region
- All Provinces and Territories
- All Census Divisions (293)
- Occupations
- 4-digit NOC (162)
- Skills
1 Recorded vacancies are provided by Statistics Canada through the Job Vacancy and Wage Survey.- ESDC Skills (216)
- Lightcast Skills (30,000+)
- Industries
- 2-digit NAICS (20)
Job postings are related to job vacancies, but the two are not the same.
Job vacancies may or may not be advertised online and refer specifically to actual unfilled positions.
However, a single job posting might reflect multiple vacancies, just one vacancy or no vacancies - for example, if an employer posts a job advertisement for which there are no current openings.
Online job postings offer a general view of job vacancies, but there are important caveats and limitations to interpreting this information:
- Many jobs are filled without being advertised.
- Certain segments of the job market (for example, urban locations and service-oriented jobs) are more likely to be posted, potentially skewing online job postings away from the total number (across regions and occupations) of job vacancies.
No, not all job postings are posted online. Additionally, some online job postings are only available on internal company job boards, meaning they would be picked up by OJP.
While it is difficult to provide an exact percentage of online job postings covered by this dataset, the most recent estimate is that more than 98% are captured. The job postings dataset is currently being collected from more than 60,000 online sources, including major job boards, local job boards, company websites, and other sources. The main source of postings not included in this dataset is job advertisements that are only available behind a login screen. An example of this would be a company's internal job board that can only be accessed by current employees for internal hiring.
This dataset does not include duplicate or reposted job postings. The data is cleaned and deduplicated to remove duplicate job postings that were advertised on multiple websites or removed from a job board and then immediately reposted. Sometimes employers do this to bring their job posting back to the top of the search results, so these postings are also treated as duplicates and removed from the results.
This dataset does not try to estimate informal or unadvertised jobs. There may occasionally be job openings filled through word of mouth or by friends or family. This trend can be difficult to track accurately, as these openings are not well documented. Because of that, this dataset focuses on the job postings that are advertised online. This provides accuracy and confidence when identifying trends in employer demand, and reduces the risk of seeing upward or downward trends that may not accurately reflect the job market due to improper modelling.
Data updates, quality, and interpretation
This data is updated daily. There is approximately a 36-hour lag between a job posting going live on a website and its appearing in the database.
This database is designed to track demand at a given point in time and does not represent postings that are currently live. This allows us to track historic demand trends. There is currently no process to remove postings from the database, so all historical postings remain in the system indefinitely.
The numbers on the dashboard are counts of postings scraped from online job boards and employer websites. These postings also undergo cleaning and deduplication to remove spam and duplicates. The numbers provided are the exact counts obtained after this cleaning and do not undergo further modelling.
The CJTD is not a forecasting tool or predictive model.
Geographic and language coverage
Although rare, a posting may occasionally be scraped that does not specify a location. When this is the case, these postings are excluded from the results. Typically, if a posting does not include a location, it is considered a spam posting. These are usually posted by employers as more of an advertisement for the company, and do not reflect a true opening at their company. These are also often referred to as "Ghost Postings" and are removed in the cleaning process.
There are currently two region filters available. The Provinces and Territories filter and the Census Division filter. These region definitions are provided by Statistics Canada.
An individual posting will not appear in more than one region. Most postings list a major city as a reference point for the job's location. If a posting lists multiple cities, only the first location is captured.
For example, if the posting contains:
"Driver Wanted in Brampton, Vaughan, or Richmond Hill, ON. Excellent Pay!"
Brampton, ON, would be the city designated for this posting.
Yes, French-language postings are included. They are also run through a deduplication process alongside the English postings to ensure they aren't double-counted.
Occupational classification and methodology
Job titles are taken from Canada's National Occupational Classification (NOC) system.
The NOC system groups occupations by the type of work performed (for example, tasks, duties, and responsibilities).
The data from job postings in the Canadian Job Trends Dashboard is matched to NOC codes so that you can explore trends from job postings based on commonly used categories of occupations.
Each job posting undergoes a classification process to tag its individual components. The first part of this process is to identify the job title listed in the posting. These titles are first standardized to the Lightcast Title Taxonomy, which comprises more than 70,000 job titles. This helps ensure all titles are clean and comparable across companies that may use slightly different terminology or spelling for the same position. Once the title is tagged and cleaned, it is put through a Title-to-NOC crosswalk created by Lightcast. This crosswalk is continually updated to ensure each title is tagged to the correct NOC code.
Training, Education, Experience and Responsibilities (TEER) categories are a classification that form part of the NOC system.
TEER categories correspond to the type and/or amount of training, education, experience and responsibility typically required to work in an occupation. TEER categories are represented by the second digit of the NOC code and take the values zero (0) to five (5):
0 - Management responsibilities
1 - Completion of a university degree (bachelor's, master's, or doctorate); or Previous experience and expertise in subject matter knowledge from a related occupation found in TEER category 2 (when applicable).
2 - Completion of a post-secondary education program of two to three years at community college, institute of technology, or CÉGEP; or Completion of an apprenticeship training program of two to five years; or Occupations with supervisory or significant safety (e.g. police officers and firefighters) responsibilities; or Several years of experience in a related occupation from TEER category 3 (when applicable).
3 - Completion of a post-secondary education program of less than two years at community college, institute of technology or CÉGEP; or Completion of an apprenticeship training program of less than two years; or More than six months of on-the-job training, training courses or specific work experience with some secondary school education; or Several years of experience in a related occupation from TEER category 4 (when applicable).
4 - Completion of secondary school; or Several weeks of on-the-job training with some secondary school education; or Experience in a related occupation from TEER category 5 (when applicable).
5 - Short work demonstration and no formal educational requirements
Skills, education, and work requirements
Yes, the CJTD includes information on skills tagged in postings, which are broken into four categories:
- Hard Skills
- Socio-Emotional Skills
- Software Skills
- Certifications
These skills come from the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy, which is made up of more than 30,000 skills. These skills are frequently updated to stay current with employers' in-demand skills.
Yes, the dashboard does include certification requirements from employers. This data is collected as part of the skills classification process, which identifies all skills and qualifications listed in a job posting. Then, specific certifications from that skills taxonomy are identified and broken out into their own category, which can be explored in the CJTD.
Yes, the CJTD does include salary information. This data is being collected from job postings in which an employer includes either a wage or a wage range. This specific data point is often referred to as Median Advertised Wages.
"Work requirements" are the skills, knowledge, tools, technology, and other descriptors identified by the employer. These are typically identified in job postings in two forms. The first is in the form of skills. Each posting is put through a classification model that identifies hard skills, socio-emotional skills, software skills, or certifications. The second thing identified is the educational requirements. This is also pulled from a posting to see the level of education required for a position.
All skills are standardized to the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy, which comprises more than 30,000 skills. This standardization allows for easier comparison across different companies that may use slightly different terminology for the same skill.
Using the CJTD
No - The CJTD is not a job board and does not allow users to view or apply for individual job postings.
No, the CJTD does not display individual job postings.
Yes, you can export the data from your queries and download the results.
Yes. You are welcome to reuse CJTD data in your presentations or reports, provided that you give proper attribution to CJTD as the data source.
Legal, privacy, and governance
All information is available on publicly accessible websites, with no restrictions on who can access it.
The information is analyzed but not reproduced, so it does not violate the author's copyright. Because none of the data collected contains information about individual Canadians (only generic employer information), the data does not violate privacy.
Support and feedback
If you have any questions about the CJTD, please feel free to contact us at: research@lmic-cimt.ca.