Digital skills assessment in jobs in Canada

Abstract

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.