Canada's top 10 tech talent cities, ranked
Credit to Author: Evan Duggan| Date: Fri, 29 Nov 2019 20:30:12 +0000
Canada has been attracting top tech talent and top-shelf tech firms at a record pace.
Home-grown firms and international companies have been setting up and expanding in Canada’s largest cities but also in smaller markets where the tech industry is being properly nurtured, global brokerage house CBRE said in its 2019 Canadian Tech Talent Report, which ranks Canada’s top 20 tech cities.
The result is record commercial and residential real estate demand and an office construction boom in several cities.
“The tech sector is so important for the commercial real estate market in Canada now,” said Jason Kiselbach, CBRE’s managing director in Vancouver. “It’s good to have a running scorecard that we publish annually to see how your city is ranking. It gives you categories of things that are important for the tech sector so you can guide city policy.”
Here are the top 10 tech cities in Canada and their total score in CBRE’s rankings, which assessed markets based on talent availability, quality of labour and cost competitiveness.
Toronto, no surprise, topped the list with 228,500 tech workers. It received an A+ for its quality of labour and has a tech concentration of 8.3 per cent. Between 2013 and 2018, the city experienced a 54 per cent increase in tech talent growth.
Ottawa stands out for its concentration of tech jobs as a percentage of overall employment. Nearly 10 per cent of Ottawa’s workers toil in the tech sector. That’s among the highest in North America and the capital has a total of 64,500 tech workers. Not bad for a government town.
Vancouver has just 75,000 tech workers, but that number is growing, fast. The arrival and expansion of marquee tech firms like Microsoft, Amazon and Apple continues to stoke a tech market that received an A+ for quality of tech talent and has experienced a 42.6 per cent five-year growth rate in tech jobs.
The Waterloo region has 20,400 tech workers, high labour quality and has experienced nearly 40 per cent growth over five years in tech jobs, the report found.
Montreal rounds out the top five. It has the second-most overall tech workers in the country with 130,200 but the city experienced only 14.6 per cent growth in tech talent from 2013 to ’18.
Here is where the scores start to drop off. While Calgary received an A for its tech labour quality and has nearly 40,000 workers in the tech sector, it experienced a nearly seven per cent decline in overall tech talent over five years.
Victoria, the smallest city on the list, has roughly 9,600 tech workers and experienced a 15.7 per cent five-year growth rate, likely stimulated partly by Metro Vancouver’s shortage of office space and high living costs.
Quebec City received a B+ for its quality of labour and has a total tech talent pool of just under 28,000. Just under seven per cent of all workers there are in the tech industry and the city experienced a 4.1 per cent five-year growth rate.
Modestly sized, but certainly growing, Hamilton experienced nearly 53 per cent in overall talent growth, but still has fewer than 20,000 tech workers (18,200 to be precise).
For a city of its size, Edmonton has only 28,400 tech workers, representing 4.2 per cent of its total employment. It received an A for its quality of labour and experienced a 25.7 per cent growth rate from 2013 to ’18.