From Shortages to Solutions: Tackling Canada’s Critical Gaps in Healthcare, Trades and Tech
Canada is facing a dramatic workforce gap. The country lacks workers with technical skills and post-secondary education, such as engineers, tradespeople, nurses, and educators. This imbalance cost an estimated $2.6 billion in lost GDP in 2024. Training and reskilling are vital but will not be enough—or fast enough— to close the gap.
To better understand the skills gap, we use occupation-level job vacancy data to identify workers in short supply. We then link the job vacancy data to the Occupational and Skills Information System (OaSIS) database to obtain the skill requirements for the occupational skill profile. This mapping provides a detailed picture of Canada’s workforce needs, including the specific skills, education, and experience employers are looking for. This analysis builds on previous research done by the Conference Board of Canada, in partnership with the Future Skills Centre, in which we quantified the potential impact of skills imbalances on Canadian productivity over the past two decades.
Key insights
The mismatch between Canada’s skilled worker labour supply and demand cost the economy $2.6 billion in 2024, reducing aggregate productivity growth by 0.1 percentage points.
The largest shortages are in healthcare, with over 16,170 excess vacancies in nursing and therapy professions and 12,460 for technical specialists in healthcare. Additionally, there are 10,250 excess vacancies for skilled trades and 1,750 for engineering occupations.
A total of 80 percent of vacant positions require formal post-secondary training. Two-thirds of these vacancies require non-university credentials, such as college and trade certifications.
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