Beyond blue and white collar: a skills-based approach to Canadian job groupings

Canadian employers are increasingly thinking about work from a skills perspective. This issue briefing takes a new approach to defining job groupings.

Document highlights

Canada needs a modern, skills-based approach to talk about employment opportunities. An aspect of this is how we group jobs together. We identified eight new employment clusters in Canada based on underlying skill similarities.

• STEM professionals have skills like programming, technology design, science, mathematics, and operations analysis that are in high demand. The labour market outlook for this cluster is strong.
• Knowledge workers are the most highly educated group. The outlook for this group is good.
• The personal services cluster emphasizes negotiation, speaking, persuasion, writing, and management of financial resources at levels that are modestly above average.
• Supervisors have a well-rounded but moderate skill set that emphasizes basic, social and emotional, and managerial skills.
• Most technical trades require some credentialing after high school. While overall skill requirements are generally low, there is often a need for highly specialized, occupation-specific skills.
• A high school diploma is usually all that’s needed for non-technical trades jobs, but skills like operation and control, equipment maintenance, repairing, equipment selection, and troubleshooting are needed.
• Builders have the highest risk of being replaced by automation. Their top skills include repairing, installation, equipment maintenance, troubleshooting, and equipment selection.
• Doers have the strongest labour market prospects among the clusters with lower levels of educational