Job vacancies spike in Q3
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Statistics Canada reports that the number of job vacancies across the country reached an all-time high of 912,600 in the third quarter of this year. This comes as employers and workers continued to adjust to easing public health restrictions and rapidly evolving economic conditions, including growing overall employment and falling unemployment.
The number of job vacancies seen at the end of the third quarter of this year was nearly 350,000 higher than at the same time in 2019. The job vacancy rate—which is the number of job vacancies as a proportion of labour demand—was 5.4 percent, also a record high and 2.1 percentage points higher than in the third quarter of 2019.
Compared with the same period two years earlier, job vacancies were up in all provinces in the third quarter of 2021. Proportionally, the largest increases were in Saskatchewan (82.7 percent), Quebec (73.1 percent) and Ontario (64.5 percent).
Five sectors driving growth
Statistics Canada reports that job vacancies increased between the third quarter of 2019 and the third quarter of 2021 in 18 of the 20 major industrial sectors.
Five sectors—health care, construction, accommodation and food, retail trade and manufacturing—accounted for two-thirds of the increase.
Over the two-year span, construction job vacancies increased by 34,300, or nearly 84 percent. This increase occurred while payroll employment was little changed, Statistics Canada reports. This in turn suggests that increased vacancies were due in part to labour market imbalances such as shortages of specific skills or geographic mismatches between vacant positions and the workers available to fill them.
The largest two-year increases were recorded in the Lower Mainland-Southwest in British Columbia (+5,600) and Toronto (+4,100).
Statistics Canada also reports that the types of skills employers are looking for is also changing. Skills listed by employers as important included active listening, critical thinking, social perceptiveness and time management—even in the construction sector.
The agency found that in British Columbia’s construction sector, for example, vacant positions were more likely to require time management, monitoring and critical thinking skills in the third quarter of 2021 than the same period two years earlier. The shift, it said, was the result of changes in the composition of job vacancies by occupation. While the overall number of job vacancies in construction in British Columbia increased by over 80 percent (+7,800) over two years, vacancies for carpenters increased 148.6 percent (+1,900), while openings for construction trades helpers and labourers increased at a lower rate (+60.9 percent, +1,800) than vacancies in construction as a whole.