These are the jobs in demand this year

Hiring sign is displayed at a grocery store in Glenview, Ill., Monday, Nov. 25, 2024. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)

As 2025 gets into full swing, gaps in Canada's job market offer new opportunities to start fresh — in some sectors and regions, more than others.

Here's a look at some of the country's most in-demand roles:

Help wanted!

For many communities across Canada, health care and social assistance is the industry most in need of new workers.

Recent job-market data show the highest number of vacancies nationwide in that sector, which includes jobs like doctors and nurses, counsellors, child care and protection workers and community housing providers.

Other high-vacancy industries include accommodations and food service (hotel workers, cooks, wait staff, etc.) retail trade (cashiers, gas station attendants, store managers) and professional, scientific or technical services (legal professionals, accountants, research scientists, advertising).

Those health-care vacancies are seeing some of the most attention from the federal government, with $47 million in federal funding announced in July to address "health workforce challenges" through improved data sharing, licensing for physicians and research.

Facing an estimated national shortage of 78,000 doctors and 117,600 nurses in the next six years, one Health Canada release cited the new spending as instrumental to strengthening Canada's health-care workforce through better-informed recruitment and retention.

Long-term projections from the federal government show health care as the country's number one industry for employment by 2031, surpassing retail trade with 2.5 million jobs, or close to 12 per cent of the working population.

But health isn't the only sector with high demand for new workers. Labour market data from across the country show varied workforce needs, and though circumstances differ by province or territory, some common threads emerge.

Besides doctors and nurses, supply-chain workers from truck drivers to retail salespersons are commonly listed in short supply, and many jurisdictions are facing the need for more teachers, school administrators and early childhood educators.

Some trends are more regional: In parts of the territories, job prospects for accountants, construction and maintenance workers are listed as "very good" on the Canada Job Bank, and parts of the Maritime region have found themselves in need of more dentists and agricultural workers.

Pulling in trends from across the country, here are some examples of jobs in need of new hires, according to the Canada Job Bank:

The recruitment roller-coaster

In general, unemployment has ticked upward and job vacancies have declined in recent years as the economic recovery following COVID-19 lockdowns has transitioned to something closer to business as usual.

Sales and service job vacancies, among the most impacted by lockdown restrictions, have faced a pronounced rise and fall in recent years, peaking in late 2021 with more than 340,000 open jobs before falling to roughly half that by mid-2024, according to Statistics Canada data. Trades and transportation jobs saw a similar trajectory, though at a smaller scale.

"The total amount of job openings in the economy is 25 per cent below where it was a year ago and if it weakens further, it will cause the unemployment rate to rise more than our base case expectations," reads an October market analysis from RBC.

"Initially, there were more job vacancies than people looking for work, so the drop in openings didn’t have a material impact on the economy. But, that’s no longer the case. The unemployment rate is now above pre-pandemic levels, and the job vacancy rate is lower."

It's not a universal trend among sectors.

Job vacancies in health have plateaued since the end of 2022, but remain high compared to pre-pandemic levels, with close to 90,000 vacancies in the second quarter of 2024, compared to just 23,000 in the mid-2010s. Education, law and government-services vacancies, meanwhile, have eclipsed those in the sciences since the waning days of COVID-19 lockdowns, with 55,000 at last count, up from roughly 20,000 in 2015.

AI anxieties

One factor that could complicate Canadian job prospects: the AI revolution.

Amid the rapid rise of programs like ChatGPT, AI tools are touted and feared alike as the all-purpose solutions that could automate some jobs out of existence. And while an AI Armageddon might not be on the immediate horizon, research appears to show those concerns aren't totally unfounded.

A Statistics Canada analysis published last fall found that as recently as 2021, a majority of workers could be exposed to "AI-related job transformation," meaning that a significant portion of their duties could be delegated to new technologies.

This was especially common among jobs with higher educational requirements, such as electrical engineers, teachers, economists, computer programmers and physicians.

The World Economic Forum's (WEF's) latest Future of Jobs report echoes that trend globally, listing jobs like bank tellers, post-office clerks and data-entry workers among the roles facing the fastest decline in the coming years.

"Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are roles that are at the lower-skilled end of the white-collar workforce," said WEF managing director Saadia Zahidi in a panel discussion at the time of the report's 2023 release. "Those are likely to be the roles that will be the most disrupted."

That said, the StatCan study cautions against jumping to conclusions, at least in the near future. In addition to impact, occupations were also assigned a value based on how much AI complemented their work, with some expected to enjoy a boost to productivity that would still require a human being at the controls.

The WEF analysis concurs, finding that in Canada, the projected creation and displacement of jobs through the rise of AI essentially balance each other out.

"That digital transition continues, year after year, to push those digital roles to the forefront," said Sue Duke, global policy lead at LinkedIn, at the 2023 panel. "Just in the past 12 months, we see roles like cybersecurity engineers, business analytics managers and AI engineers really coming through strongly, with a particular surge in generative AI,"

In short, workers in some roles might not just survive the rise of AI; they may find themselves thriving.

"Exposure to AI does not necessarily imply a risk of job loss. At the very least, it could imply some degree of job transformation," the StatCan researchers write.

"Only time will tell how the impact of AI will unfold."