FAQ
Vicinity Jobs uses data from a variety of corporate websites and job boards (such as Indeed and Job Bank). However, not all online job postings are captured. First, we cannot guarantee that every website with job postings is identified for data collection. Second, certain websites (e.g., LinkedIn) use technologies that make it impossible for third parties to monitor their content.
No. Not all job postings can be reliably matched to a geographic location. In some cases, the employer does not list geographic information. In other cases, the information cannot be classified or is contradictory. The dashboard contains data only for those job postings that are reliably identified with a geographic location. Approximately 95% of job postings captured by Vicinity Jobs are matched to a specific geographic location within a province or territory.
The locations included in the dashboard are primarily based on the 76 Economic Regions defined by Statistics Canada. You can search for your city or town using the 2016 Census profile website of Statistics Canada to see which Economic Region you live in.
No. The dashboard provides information about the work requirements (skills, knowledge, tools and technologies, other) of online job postings in various locations across Canada. This means that the dashboard can help inform users about the general trends of jobs posted online and their associated work requirements. However, the dashboard is not a job application website.
Data from online job postings provide near-real time information on the types of jobs employers are seeking to fill and the work requirements associated with those jobs. However, as with all data sources, there are caveats and limitations. Please remember this when interpreting the information on this dashboard.
LMIC works with record level data – i.e., individual online job postings. However, as a free information tool, the dashboard eliminates observations of counts by occupation and counts by work requirement with less than 50 underlying observations. LMIC also eliminates counts by occupation and work requirement with less than 25 underlying observations. Further, all counts reported are rounded.
Every month. Vicinity Jobs scrapes, cleans and structures data (see methodology) from online job postings gathered from employer and job websites. Part of this cleaning process involves removing the postings from previous months. This means that each month shows a unique set of new job postings. The final data is updated monthly, approximately 10 days after the end of the month.
No information is collected about the duration of a job posting. Vicinity Jobs collects only new online job postings. The data do not reflect when or why a job posting closes. Often postings go offline on an automated schedule and not when the job vacancy is filled. The expiry of a job posting, therefore, is not a reliable indicator of how long it takes for an employer to fill a vacancy.
All data on the dashboard are derived from online job postings and very few employers include salary or wage information. Fewer than 20% of the online job postings processed by Vicinity Jobs include it. Given the amount of missing information and skewed distribution of available salary figures, we have not included this in the dashboard.
Mais oui! In June 2020, Vicinity Jobs, in partnership with LMIC, developed an algorithm for cleaning and categorizing French language job postings – including the de-duplication of jobs posted separately in both French and English. Note that because jobs postings are deduplicated across languages, there is no way to separate “English language job postings” from “French language job postings”.
LMIC is working with Vicinity Jobs to apply their bilingual algorithms to historic online job postings. Vicinity Jobs had been collecting French-language job postings from January 2018 onwards, but only recently developed the technologies needed to reliably process this text. At present bilingual information from January 2019 to the present is available. When the 2018 online job posting text has been processed it will be added to the dashboard.
The education typically required for a job is defined by the 4-digit NOC (National Occupation Classification) code associated with each posting. In the NOC system, each occupation is associated with a minimum level of education required. There are five education levels in the NOC:
- A1 – Management: The education level required for managerial positions. Such jobs do not necessarily require college or university education.
- A2 – University Education: For occupations that require a university degree (e.g., a bachelor’s degree, a doctorate, or a professional degree).
- B – College or Vocational Education or Apprenticeship Training: For occupations that require a college diploma or specific training/apprenticeship, such as chef and electrician.
- C – Secondary School and/or Occupation-Specific Training: For occupations that usually require high school or job-specific training, such as industrial butcher and food and beverage server.
- D – On-the-job Training or No Formal Education Required: For occupations that usually provide on-the-job training, such as fruit picker or oil field worker.
Work requirements are the skills, knowledge, tools and technology, and other descriptors identified by the employer. Vicinity Jobs organizes the job posting text into its work requirements taxonomy (which includes over 40,000 unique times, although only 2,500 appear with significant regularity). This taxonomy is then organized by LMIC into four broad categories — skills, knowledge domains, tools and technologies, and other based on ESDC’s Skills and Competencies Taxonomy. ESDC’s Taxonomy includes seven categories, four of which are grouped into “other” — work activities, work context, personal abilities and attributes, and interests. These work requirements can then be grouped by geography, time and occupation by 4-digit NOC.
Yes, Vicinity Jobs links job postings to the work requirements identified in its taxonomy. The full set of work requirements (over 40,000 unique items are possible, with approximately 2,500 appearing regularly) have been organized by LMIC into four broad categories: skills, knowledge domains, tools and technologies, and other. These categorizations are based on ESDC’s Skills and Competencies Taxonomy.
No, job postings are related to job vacancies, but the two are distinct. Job vacancies may or may not be advertised online and refer specifically to the actual unfilled positions. However, a single job posting might reflect multiple vacancies, just one vacancy, or no vacancies (if the employer maintains a posting for which there are no current positions). Online job postings offer a general view of job vacancies, but there are important caveats and limitations to interpreting this information. First, many jobs are filled without being advertised. Second, certain segments of the job market (e.g., urban locations, service-oriented jobs) are more likely to be posted, potentially skewing online job postings away from the real distribution (across regions and occupations) of job vacancies.
Job titles are taken from the detailed occupational category (4-digit NOC [National Occupation Classification] system). The NOC are used to group occupations based on the type of work performed (e.g., tasks, duties, responsibilities). The data provided by Vicinity Jobs matches job postings to detailed NOC codes. However, not all job postings can be reliably identified. Approximately 15% are associated with broad occupational categories only (1-digit NOC codes). A further 10–15% cannot be reliably associated with any NOC. The dashboard contains data only for those reliability identified with a detailed occupational category, which is about 70% of all online job postings.
Given the limited number of observations by occupation and/or work requirements for certain regions (e.g., the north or rural communities), job posting information at a detailed occupational level is often unavailable. For users interested in less populous regions, the higher level (e.g., 1-digit NOC) occupational groups provide a way by which online job posting information can be reported.
Job postings are linked to occupations using Vicinity Jobs’ proprietary machine learning algorithms, which map them to detailed occupational categories (see methodology). If the algorithm is unable to categorize a job posting into a detailed occupational category (4-digit NOC), it will attempt to use the broad occupational category (1-digit NOC). Typically, 10–15% of job postings lack so many details that they cannot be associated even with a broad occupational category. The dashboard contains data only for those job postings reliability identified with a 4-digit NOC (about 70% of all postings).
Employers are not required to follow a standard format when creating a job posting. Many employers only include information pertaining to the duties of a particular job; industry information and other important details are often missing from job postings. While Vicinity Jobs uses algorithms linking job postings to industry codes (i.e., NAICS), the lack of reliable matches (typically less than 50%) means that most job postings are not clearly associated with an industry. Given the high rate of missing information, we have not included it in the dashboard.
The data provided only estimate the true number of online job postings, so LMIC rounds the raw counts to the closest 10 if the true value is less than 1000 and to the closest 100 if the value is greater than 1000. While Vicinity Jobs collects a near complete set of online job postings and removes most duplicates, the collection and cleaning process is not perfect.
The process of collecting online job posting information from various websites is both legal and ethical. All information is found on publicly available websites with no restrictions on who can access the data. The information is then analyzed but not reproduced, so it does not violate the author’s copyright. Further, because none of the data collected contains information about individual Canadians (only generic employer information), the data do not violate privacy.
Glossary of Terms
Geography: Vicinity Jobs links job postings to over 2,000 detailed geographies across Canada, many of which are too small to be shown on the dashboard. The geographies available in the dashboard are Canada, provinces and territories, and geographic regions, which are based on the 76 economic regions used by Statistics Canada. There are some exceptions, where the geographic region does not correspond to an economic region and these are listed in the table below.
| Province | Dashboard Location(s) | Variation from Statistics Canada Economic Regions |
| Alberta | Athabasca—Grand Prairie—Peace River--Cold Lake | The economic regions of Athabasca—Grand Prairie—Peace River and Cold Lake—Wood Buffalo are combined excluding Wood Buffalo, which is a separate location. For example, Wood Buffalo includes Fort McMurray. |
| Alberta | Wood Buffalo | |
| Alberta | Edmonton Metropolitan Region | Economic region of Edmonton Capital Region |
| British Columbia | Mainland/Southwest (excl. Greater Vancouver) | The location Mainland/ Southwest is the economic region excluding Greater Vancouver, which is a separate location. |
| British Columbia | Greater Vancouver | |
| British Columbia | Vancouver Island/Coast (excl. Victoria) | The location Vancouver Island/Coast is the economic region excluding Victoria, which is a separate location. |
| British Columbia | Greater Victoria Area | |
| Manitoba | Central Manitoba | Combines the economic regions of North Central Manitoba and South Central Manitoba. |
| Manitoba | North Manitoba | The economic region of North Manitoba split into two locations, North Manitoba (census division 21) and Northwest Manitoba (census division 23). For example, Churchill is included in Northwest Manitoba and The Pas is included in North Manitoba. |
| Manitoba | Northwest Manitoba | |
| Manitoba | Eastern Manitoba and Western Manitoba | The economic regions of Southeast Manitoba and Southwest Manitoba. |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | Labrador | The economic region of West Coast—Northern Peninsula—Labrador has been separated into Labrador and West Coast. |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | West Coast Newfoundland | |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | South Coast Newfoundland | Economic region of South Coast—Burin Peninsula. |
| Newfoundland and Labrador | Central Newfoundland | Economic region of Notre Dame—Central Bonavista Bay. |
| Ontario | Kitchener--Waterloo | Economic region of Kitchener—Waterloo—Barrie excluding Simcoe County. |
| Ontario | Muskoka—Kawarthas--Barrie | Combines the economic region of Muskoka-Kawarthas with Simcoe County, including Barrie. |
| Québec | Capitale-Nationale Region incl. Québec
Chaudière-Appalaches excl. Québec |
The CMA of Québec, including the small part in the Chaudière-Appalaches economic region, is combined with the Capitale-Nationale economic region. |
| Québec | Montréal
Lanaudière excl. Montréal Laurentides excl. Montréal Montérégie excl. Montréal |
Montréal is the CMA which includes the economic regions of Montréal and Laval and part of three other economic regions. These three economic regions will exclude the CMA of Montréal. |
Job categories: Job categories refer to the ten broad occupational categories (i.e., 1-digit NOC) based on the 4-tier hierarchical arrangement of Canadian occupational groups. Each broad category has a unique 1-digit code (0 to 9).
Knowledge: LMIC categorizes work requirements as “knowledge” when a particular domain is used to perform specific job functions. Knowledge domains include languages, academic disciplines (e.g., biology), business practices (e.g., budgeting, Lean Six Sigma) and more. Knowledge also included computer programming languages such as Python and C++.
National Occupational Classification (NOC): The NOC system is the organizational framework of occupations in the Canadian labour market. It is used to classify information from statistical surveys and to compile, analyze and communicate information about occupations. It uses 4 digits, each signifying a different aspect, to code all occupations.
Other (work requirements): LMIC categorizes work requirements as “other” when they fall into one of four categories in ESDC’s Skills and Competencies Taxonomy: work activities, work context, personal abilities and attributes, and interests.
Province: Province and territory refer to the major political units of Canada.
Skills: LMIC categorizes work requirements as “skills” when they align with this ESDC definition: “Skills are the developed capacities that an individual must have to be effective in a job, role, function, task, or duty.” See LMIC Insight Report no. 16 for further details.
Tools and technology: LMIC categorizes work requirements as “tools and technology” when they are associated with machinery, equipment or other specific objects used to perform job functions.
Web scraping: Web scraping is the process of collecting data from public websites. It usually refers to using automated software to extract large amounts of raw text and data from a variety of websites. However, the term may be used more broadly to encompass any process of gathering and copying information from the Internet, whether automated or manual.
Read more on web scraping in LMI Insight Report no. 32, Through the Looking Glass: Assessing Skills Measures Using 21st Century Technologies
Work requirements: In the case of this dashboard, work requirements are defined by the proprietary taxonomy of Vicinity Jobs. Using natural language processing of the job description, the raw text from each job posting is associated to as many work requirements as possible. Work requirements are grouped into four categories: skills, knowledge, tools and technologies, and other.
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