Canada Job Expo Job Market News | September 2026
For generations, Canadians have been given a fairly straightforward formula for employment:
Get an education. Earn the credential. Find a job. Build experience. Advance your career.
Education still matters.
Credentials still matter.
Experience certainly matters.
But Canada’s labour market is increasingly asking another question:
What can you actually do?
That question matters to almost everyone participating in today’s job market.
It matters to the university graduate struggling to turn a degree into a first professional opportunity.
It matters to the skilled tradesperson whose technical abilities are increasingly valuable.
It matters to the experienced worker whose job title may have changed even though many of their underlying capabilities remain useful.
It matters to the newcomer whose previous position or credential may not be immediately understood by a Canadian employer.
It matters to the Veteran whose military experience includes leadership, logistics, technical expertise or project management but may not fit neatly into a civilian job title.
And it matters to employers receiving hundreds of applications while still saying they cannot find people with the skills they need.
Canada’s employment challenge is therefore not simply about how many people are looking for work or how many vacancies employers have.
Increasingly, it is about whether skills and opportunities actually match.
Canada Has More Than Half a Million Job Vacancies – But That Does Not Mean Everyone Can Fill Them
The latest detailed vacancy data illustrates the problem.
Statistics Canada reported approximately 510,200 job vacancies in Canada during the second quarter of 2026.
At the same time, there were approximately three unemployed people for every job vacancy.
At first glance, that can seem contradictory.
If hundreds of thousands of jobs are available and significantly more people are unemployed, why are employers still talking about recruitment difficulties?
Because a vacancy and an unemployed person are not automatically a match.
A construction company looking for a licensed tradesperson cannot necessarily fill that vacancy with someone whose experience is entirely in accounting.
A technology company looking for a cybersecurity specialist cannot necessarily fill the position with someone who has general computer knowledge.
A healthcare organization cannot place someone into a regulated clinical occupation simply because that person wants to work.
And an employer in one community cannot necessarily recruit an available worker living hundreds of kilometres away.
The labour market does not match people to jobs simply by counting them.
Skills, experience, credentials, geography, wages, working conditions, availability and employer requirements all matter.
The Education Numbers Tell an Interesting Story
One of the most important developments in the latest vacancy data concerns education.
In the second quarter of 2026, Canadian employers reported approximately 71,100 vacancies requiring a trades certificate or diploma.
That was up from approximately 68,400 a year earlier.
Vacancies requiring a high school diploma or less also increased, reaching approximately 294,300.
At the same time, vacancies requiring a bachelor’s degree or higher declined to approximately 80,800, a year-over-year decrease of 5.9%.
There were approximately 4.9 unemployed people with a bachelor’s degree or higher for every vacancy requiring that level of education.
This does not mean university education has lost its value.
Nor does it mean everyone should abandon university and enter a trade.
It means something more useful:
The relationship between education and employment is more complicated than simply obtaining the highest possible credential.
The question is increasingly whether a person’s education connects to skills and occupations for which employers have demand.
A Degree Is an Asset – Not a Job Guarantee
For someone who invested years in post-secondary education, this can be difficult to hear.
Education can provide knowledge, analytical ability, technical expertise, communication skills, professional networks and access to occupations that would otherwise be unavailable.
But the labour market does not guarantee employment simply because somebody earned a credential.
Employers hire to solve problems.
They need people who can design, build, repair, analyze, communicate, manage, sell, program, operate, care, teach, supervise, organize or perform thousands of other functions.
A credential can demonstrate that someone has completed a course of study.
The employer still needs to understand:
What can this person contribute?
That distinction is becoming increasingly important.
Employers Say Specialized Skills Are Still Difficult to Find
The mismatch appears from the employer side as well.
A 2026 Robert Half survey of more than 1,360 Canadian hiring managers found that 58% planned to increase permanent hiring during the second half of the year.
Another 45% expected to hire contract professionals to obtain specialized expertise or support important projects.
Yet employers participating in the research continued to report difficulty finding candidates with the specialized skills required to carry out business priorities.
That is an important combination.
Employers can want to hire while simultaneously struggling to hire.
That does not necessarily mean there are no applicants.
It can mean the applicants and the requirements are not lining up.
Canada’s Own Employment System Is Moving Toward Skills-to-Job Matching
There is another indication of where the employment market may be heading.
The federal government’s 2026-27 departmental plan says Job Bank is being modernized over four years with the goal of moving beyond traditional job searching and labour-market information toward what it describes as a “skills-to-job” platform.
The planned direction includes connecting workers and employers using information about jobs, skills and training.
The modernization also includes AI-enhanced job matching and connections to training and upskilling opportunities.
That does not prove every Canadian employer is adopting skills-first hiring.
But it demonstrates that Canada’s national employment infrastructure itself is increasingly being designed around a fundamental idea:
Matching skills to opportunities may be more useful than simply matching job titles to vacancies.
Your Job Title Does Not Tell an Employer Everything You Can Do
This is particularly important for experienced workers.
Imagine someone who has spent 15 years as an operations manager.
That title tells us something.
But underneath the title might be experience in:
supervising employees
budgeting
scheduling
procurement
inventory
safety
vendor management
customer service
project coordination
process improvement
reporting
conflict resolution
technology systems
Those capabilities may exist in dozens of industries.
If that person’s industry contracts, searching only for another position with exactly the same title may unnecessarily narrow the job search.
The better question is:
Where else are these capabilities needed?
That is the beginning of skills-based career thinking.
Career Changers Need to Translate, Not Erase, Their Experience
People changing careers frequently make one of two mistakes.
The first is assuming that none of their previous experience matters because they are entering a new field.
The second is assuming that all of it automatically transfers.
Neither is necessarily true.
A retail manager moving into another industry may bring leadership, scheduling, customer relations, inventory management, sales and problem-solving experience.
But that person may still need technical knowledge specific to the new occupation.
A manufacturing worker may possess safety, quality, equipment, process and production experience that transfers into another industrial environment.
But a particular certification may still be required.
A career transition therefore requires two separate questions:
Which of my existing skills transfer?
And:
What genuinely new skills do I need?
That distinction can prevent people from unnecessarily starting their careers from zero.
Veterans May Have More Transferable Skills Than Their Civilian Résumé Shows
Veterans provide an excellent example of why skills translation matters.
Military occupations can involve substantial experience in:
leadership
logistics
technical systems
operations
planning
security
communications
teamwork
equipment
project execution
decision-making under pressure
But military terminology does not always translate naturally into civilian recruitment language.
A civilian employer may never have encountered the military job title appearing on a résumé.
That does not mean the experience is irrelevant.
The candidate’s challenge is to explain the underlying capabilities in terminology connected to the employer’s needs.
Employers also have a responsibility here.
Organizations looking for leadership, technical expertise, discipline or operational capability may miss strong candidates when recruitment systems rely too heavily on exact job titles.
Newcomers Can Face a Similar Translation Problem
Internationally trained professionals can encounter another version of the same challenge.
Someone may have performed sophisticated professional work outside Canada, but the employer may not immediately understand:
the organization they worked for
the credential they earned
the terminology used in their previous country
the scale of their responsibilities
whether the occupation is regulated in Canada
how their previous experience corresponds with Canadian requirements
That makes skills translation extremely important.
A résumé that simply lists foreign job titles may not communicate enough.
The candidate needs to explain what they accomplished, which technologies or processes they used, what responsibilities they held and how those capabilities relate to the position being pursued.
At the same time, regulated occupations are different.
Licensing and credential requirements cannot simply be replaced by transferable skills.
Skills-based thinking does not mean ignoring legitimate professional standards.
It means separating requirements that are genuinely necessary from assumptions based only on familiar job titles or backgrounds.
Skilled Trades Demonstrate Why Skills Matter
The latest vacancy numbers also reinforce the importance of skilled trades.
Vacancies requiring a trades certificate or diploma reached approximately 71,100 in the second quarter of 2026, while the average offered hourly wage for those vacancies was approximately $30.90.
The numbers vary enormously between occupations and regions, and a trade is not automatically the right career for everyone.
But the data provides an important reminder:
The Canadian economy needs many different forms of expertise.
A university degree is one form.
A trade certification is another.
Technical training is another.
Industry experience is another.
Digital capability is another.
Professional licensing is another.
The employment conversation should not treat one pathway as inherently superior to all others.
The more useful question is whether the pathway develops capabilities that connect to real labour-market needs.
What Are Employers Actually Looking For?
The answer varies enormously by occupation.
A hospital and a construction company do not need identical skills.
Neither do a bank, manufacturer, technology company, government department, logistics business or small retailer.
However, some capabilities travel across industries.
Canada’s Skills for Success framework identifies nine foundational and transferable areas:
reading, writing, numeracy, digital skills, problem solving, communication, creativity and innovation, collaboration, and adaptability.
These are not substitutes for occupational expertise.
A strong communicator cannot simply become an electrician without the required training.
A collaborative employee cannot become a nurse without the appropriate education and licensing.
But technical capability combined with strong transferable skills can make someone considerably more valuable.
Employers often need both.
AI Makes Skills More Important, Not Less
Artificial intelligence adds another dimension.
As discussed in Canada Job Expo’s examination of AI and the Canadian job market, technology is increasingly capable of assisting with routine information-processing tasks.
That can change what employers value.
If software can produce a basic draft, the employee’s value may increasingly come from knowing whether the draft is accurate.
If AI can summarize information, the worker may need to determine what matters.
If technology can analyze data, someone still needs to understand the business problem and make decisions based on the analysis.
The result may be greater value placed on combinations of capabilities:
technical knowledge + judgment
AI literacy + industry expertise
data + communication
automation + problem-solving
technology + human relationships
Workers who understand both the tool and the context in which it is being used may be particularly valuable.
Employers Should Examine Their Own Job Requirements
Skills mismatches are not solely the candidate’s responsibility.
Employers should also examine how they recruit.
A job description can accumulate requirements over time.
A position that genuinely requires three essential capabilities can eventually contain a list of 15 requirements because every previous preference has been added to the posting.
That can unnecessarily shrink the candidate pool.
Employers should ask:
Which skills are essential on the first day?
Which can be learned?
Which credentials are legally or operationally necessary?
Which requirements are simply preferences?
Are we rejecting people who could perform the job because their previous title is unfamiliar?
Are we asking for years of experience when demonstrated capability would be more relevant?
A more precise job description can benefit both the employer and the candidate.
Job Seekers Should Build a Skills Inventory
Most people can name their job title.
Far fewer can immediately name their strongest ten employable skills.
That is worth changing.
Take a sheet of paper and divide your experience into four areas:
Technical skills
What systems, equipment, software, tools, processes or specialized knowledge can you use?
Transferable skills
What can you do that applies across workplaces: communicate, lead, organize, analyze, solve problems, negotiate or collaborate?
Industry knowledge
What do you understand because you have actually worked in a particular environment?
Evidence
Where have you demonstrated those capabilities?
The last category is crucial.
Do not simply say:
“I am a problem solver.”
Explain the problem you solved.
Do not simply say:
“I have leadership skills.”
Explain whom you led and what you accomplished.
Skills become more convincing when there is evidence behind them.
Do Not Collect Credentials Without Understanding the Market
When someone cannot find work, enrolling in another course can feel productive.
Sometimes it is exactly the right decision.
Sometimes it is not.
Before paying for additional education or training, ask:
Do employers actually request this credential?
Does it address a skill I am genuinely missing?
Is the occupation growing where I live?
Will the credential qualify me for something I cannot currently do?
Is it recognized by employers?
Training should have a purpose.
A collection of unrelated certificates does not necessarily create employability.
The objective should be to close a clearly identified gap.
Geography Can Turn a Skills Shortage Into a Skills Surplus
Skills cannot be separated from location.
The latest vacancy data showed that Toronto recorded approximately 3,600 more vacancies than a year earlier, an increase of 4.3%.
During the same period, vacancies in the Kitchener-Waterloo-Barrie economic region declined by approximately 1,100, or 6.4%.
A skill can therefore be relatively difficult to find in one region and more readily available in another.
Workers who are able and willing to commute, relocate or work remotely may have access to a wider employment market.
Not everyone can do that.
Family responsibilities, housing costs, transportation, disability, community connections and many other factors affect mobility.
That is another reason national statements about “skills shortages” need context.
Where the skill is needed matters.
Skills-First Does Not Mean Qualifications Do Not Matter
This distinction is essential.
Skills-first hiring should not become a slogan that suggests credentials are unnecessary.
Some occupations require formal qualifications for very good reasons.
Doctors, nurses, engineers, electricians and many other regulated professionals operate within licensing and certification systems designed around competence, safety and professional standards.
The point is not to eliminate qualifications.
The point is to recognize that many jobs contain requirements that can be evaluated through capability, experience and evidence, rather than only through a previous job title or a particular educational path.
Employers need to determine which is which.
What Should Job Seekers Do Now?
Look at ten current positions you would genuinely consider applying for.
Do not apply yet.
Read them.
Write down every skill or requirement that appears repeatedly.
Then compare those requirements with your own experience.
You will usually find three categories:
Skills you already have.
Skills you have but are not communicating effectively.
Skills you genuinely do not have.
Those three categories require three different responses.
The first needs evidence.
The second needs better positioning.
The third may require training.
That is a far more strategic approach than sending the same résumé to another 100 employers.
What Should Employers Do Now?
Employers should conduct essentially the same exercise from the opposite direction.
Before posting another vacancy, determine what successful performance in the position actually requires.
Separate essential capabilities from preferences.
Consider where those skills might exist outside the traditional candidate pool.
An experienced worker from another industry may possess them.
A Veteran may possess them.
A newcomer may possess them.
A mature worker may possess them.
A person with a disability may possess them.
A recent graduate may possess part of the capability and be able to learn the remainder.
A career changer may possess more transferable experience than their previous title suggests.
Broadening a talent pool does not mean lowering standards.
It means becoming more precise about what the standard actually is.
Canada’s Employment Challenge Is Increasingly About Connection
Canada has unemployed people.
Canada has employers with vacancies.
Canada has people with considerable education.
Canada has people with technical experience.
Canada has people whose capabilities are underused.
And Canada has organizations saying they cannot find the skills they need.
Those facts can all exist simultaneously.
The challenge is connecting them.
That requires better labour-market information.
Better job descriptions.
Better career decisions.
More targeted training.
Better translation of transferable skills.
And better opportunities for employers and candidates to actually communicate.
Canada Job Expo’s Perspective
For Canada Job Expo, the movement toward skills-based employment is particularly important because recruitment ultimately works when an employer can understand what a person can contribute and a candidate can understand what the organization actually needs.
A job title helps begin that conversation.
A résumé helps document it.
Technology can help match it.
But none of those things completely replaces the need to understand capability.
Canada’s workforce includes graduates, tradespeople, professionals, newcomers, Veterans, mature workers, career changers, people with disabilities, workers displaced by economic change and people whose experience does not fit neatly into a conventional job title.
Employers that look only for the candidate they hired last time may overlook people capable of solving the problems they have today.
Candidates who look only for the job title they held last time may overlook opportunities where their experience has genuine value.
The Canadian job market appears to be moving toward a more complicated question than:
“What was your last job?”
Increasingly, employers, workers and Canada’s employment systems are being pushed toward another:
“What can you do – and where is that capability needed?”
For both employers and job seekers, learning how to answer that question may become one of the most important employment skills of all.