With all the talk in the news lately about a ‘skills shortage’ in Canada, do you ever wonder exactly what abilities companies are having difficulty finding? Our friends at Wanted Analytics examined the contents of online job postings on paid websites like Workopolis as well as on free sites and government job boards to determine the most in-demand skills by Canadian employers.

For this report, the team compared the contents of the online job postings with the available skills of candidates on the market to determine the level of demand.

The most sought after skills in Canada

    Bilingual
    Quality Assurance (QA)
    Structured Query Language (SQL)
    Technical Support
    Software Development
    JavaScript
    Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
    Linux
    Food Preparation
    Hypertext Markup Language (HTML)
    Unix
    User Experience Design (UX)

Bilingualism is constantly among the most sought-after skill in Canadian job ads – particularly English and French bilingualism. The ability to communicate fluently in both official languages is often required for sales and service roles among many others. [View Bilingual jobs]

Beyond just the number of times a skill is mentioned in online job ads, the Wanted team analyzed the difficulty to hire by how available the desired talent is among candidates. So for example, while ‘bilingual’ appears in many more job postings than ‘UX,’ there are many more bilingual workers on the market than there are UX designers. [View UX jobs]

In fact, because there are relatively so few people with User Experience Design skills on the market compared to the demand in job postings, UX is calculated to be one of the hardest skills to recruit for.

According to the Wanted Analytics Data, the most difficult skill for Canadian employers to hire right now is Hypertext Markup Language or HTML coding. [View jobs] While there are more people available with HTML skills than UX abilities, it appears in many more job postings. So the demand for people with HTML abilities in job postings exceeds the number of candidates available to apply right now by the widest margin.

We looked at a similar report of online job ads from Wanted last month to determine the 15 jobs that are almost constantly available in Canada. Interestingly, cooks and kitchen helpers were on that list – and ‘Food Preparation’ was a stand-out non technical skill among the hard-to-find skills. [View Hospitality and Food Service jobs]

Earlier this year, our team analysed the tens of thousands of job postings on Workopolis specifically along with the keywords that employers use to search for candidates in our resume database in order to narrow down a list of 10 essential skills that Canadian employers are looking to recruit right now.

See also:

The 10 hardest jobs for Canadian employers to fill in 2014

The exact resume keywords employers search for by industry

The highest paying tech jobs, and how to get them

Source: Wanted Analytics: What Skills Should Be Trained in Canada?