He latest Canadian labour-force report landed with a thud on the first Friday of April. Fifty-five thousand Canadians found themselves out of work in March, pushing the national unemployment rate up 0.2 percentage points to 7.2%. That’s more than one million able-bodied Canadians looking for work. Numbers like these are enough to make anyone simply thankful for having a job, any job, let alone one that pays a decent wage.
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But before you shy away from asking for that raise or taking a leap of faith to pursue that dream job, consider this: most of the jobs lost in March were a few specific sectors: accommodations and food services, public administration and manufacturing. All but public administration are sectors that have been shedding jobs for the past decade. Employment in all other industries was relatively unchanged, and in some sectors, there is still plenty of growth.
To create this year’s list, we started by combing through data provided by Statistics Canada on more than 600 job categories. Jobs earning less than $60, 000 a year are dropped off our list. From there, we look for the top-paying jobs that have had steady growth in both the number of people employed, and in wages, since 2006. After all, a high-paying job is only useful if you can actually land it.
With that in mind, we also account for how much competition there will be for these jobs in the future using data from Human Resources and Skills Development Canada, which projects future labour supply and demand to 2020. Not surprisingly, several of the top jobs on our list are in Alberta’s oilpatch, where the gap between openings and eligible candidates has already begun driving up salaries.
Unemployment sits at less than 5% in the province and below 4% the closer you get to the oil-rich areas near Fort McMurray, which are experiencing huge demand for three of our 10 best jobs: oil & gas supervisors, petroleum engineers and chemical engineers. What’s more, each of these jobs carries a median annual salary of $75, 000 and up. And the best news for job-seekers is that demand for these positions isn’t expected to drop off anytime soon.
Danny Littlewood