This study uses published job advertisements to examine organizations’ stated demand for digital skills in Canada. We apply a structured and replicable text-mining methodology to 14,010 Indeed Canada postings, combining web scraping, standardized text preprocessing, bigram tokenization, dictionary-based detection, manual validation, and mapping to the DigComp 2.0 framework. Although advanced digital skills appear in the corpus, employer-declared demand is concentrated in Microsoft Office tools, data entry, basic data management, social media, information systems, computer systems, databases, and data analysis. These findings suggest that Canadian employers are not only recruiting for specialized digital transformation expertise, but also for the foundational digital competence required to perform ordinary service, administrative, and retail work in increasingly digitized environments.
This paper proposes a methodological framework for identifying economic clusters using unsupervised learning techniques applied to industry growth co-movements. Unlike conventional cluster identification approaches—based on product similarity, input–output linkages, or expert-defined industrial taxonomies—this method infers industry relatedness directly from observed dynamic behaviour. Using firm counts from the Registre des entreprises du Québec (REQ) between 1996 and 2024, we compute a correlation-based similarity matrix of annual industry growth rates and apply three clustering algorithms: hierarchical Ward clustering, K-means, and K-medoids. We evaluate each configuration using a validation metric, selecting the cluster definitions that maximize within-cluster coherence relative to between-cluster similarity. Our findings demonstrate that growth-based clustering reveals relationships that differ substantially from official industry classifications, identifying cross-sector linkages and dynamic co-vulnerabilities that static taxonomies do not capture. The paper concludes by discussing potential applications—including monitoring industrial resilience, detecting emerging clusters, and complementing traditional regional analysis—and outlines avenues for future methodological development.
En raison des récents retours au bureau mis en place par certaines entreprises et certains gouvernements canadiens, le pourcentage de Canadiens travaillant à domicile est désormais plus faible qu’il ne l’était au cours de certaines années postpandémiques, comme 2022. Si cette comparaison fournit des renseignements utiles sur la mesure dans laquelle le télétravail est devenu moins fréquent depuis les années postpandémiques, elle ne répond pas à une question importante : dans quelle mesure les taux de télétravail ont-ils augmenté entre 2016 et 2026, deux années suffisamment éloignées du déclenchement de la pandémie de COVID-19 pour ne pas être touchées par les restrictions de courte durée imposées durant cette période. À partir des données du recensement de la population de 2016 et des suppléments de l’Enquête sur la population active de mai 2020 à mai 2026, nous montrons que le pourcentage de Canadiens effectuant la plupart de leurs heures de travail à domicile a plus que doublé au cours de la dernière décennie, passant de 7,1 % en mai 2016 à 17,0 % en mai 2026. Comme les restrictions liées à la pandémie de COVID-19 ne s’appliquent plus en 2026, ces résultats donnent à penser que, dans certains secteurs, des entreprises continuent d’expérimenter certaines formes de travail à domicile — hybride ou non — ou jugent celles-ci souhaitables sous certains aspects, comme la rétention du personnel, la rentabilité et la productivité. Comme l’impact du travail à domicile sur la performance des entreprises demeure actuellement inconnu au Canada, il convient de retenir ce message comme un fait stylisé important pour les recherches futures.
As a result of recent returns to office implemented by some Canadian businesses and governments, the percentage of Canadians working from home is now lower than it was during some post-COVID-19 pandemic years such as 2022. While this comparison provides useful information on the degree to which work telework has become less frequent since post-pandemic years, it does not address an important issue: the degree to which rates of telework have increased from 2016 to 2026, two years that are far apart from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and that are unaffected by the short-term restrictions implemented during this pandemic. Using data from the Census of the Population of 2016 and the May 2020 to May 2026 supplements of the Labour Force Survey, we show that the percentage of Canadians working most of their hours from home more than doubled over the last decade, increasing from 7.1% in May 2016 to 17.0% in May 2026. Since restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic no longer apply in 2026, these results suggest that in some sectors, some firms are still experimenting with some forms of work from home—hybrid or not—or view these as desirable along some dimensions such as employee retention, profitability and productivity. Since the impact of work from home on firm performance is currently unknown in Canada, this message is worth keeping in mind as an important stylized fact for future research.
