'There is high demand for tech talent in both large and small markets,' says report
Toronto and Ottawa are among the top 10 tech talent markets in North America, according to a recent report.
Toronto ranked fourth overall while Ottawa secured the 10th spot after both moving up one spot from last year, according to CBRE.
The San Francisco Bay Area kept its place at the top of the list that uses 13 metrics to measure each market’s depth, vitality and attractiveness to companies seeking tech talent and to tech workers seeking employment.
“Tech talent concentration metrics have the highest weights because they signify clustering of tech workers. Labor costs for tech talent are weighted more heavily than office rents because companies allocate more capital to labor than to real estate,” says CBRE.
Also securing their places in the top 10 ranking are: Seattle (2nd), New York Metro (3rd), Austin (5th), Washington, D.C. (6th), Boston (7th), Denver (8th) and Dallas-Ft. Worth (9th).
“As companies across all industries use more technology, there is high demand for tech talent in both large and small markets. Major gateway markets dominate overall tech talent growth because of their size,” says CBRE.
Source: CBRE
Meanwhile, Toronto (3rd) and Montreal (10th) secured their places in the top 10 among those with the biggest number in their tech talent workforce.
Between 2018 and 2023, Toronto added the most tech talent jobs (95,900), followed by the San Francisco Bay Area (68,610) and Dallas-Ft. Worth (46,380).
Markets with the highest tech job growth rates were Calgary (78%), Ottawa (52%), the Waterloo Region (46%), Toronto (44%) and Vancouver (31%).
Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming into the talent acquisition and management field at the most opportune time, according to one expert.
What market has the most AI tech talent?
Meanwhile, three Canadian cities made it to the top 10 artificial intelligence tech talent by market list. These are Toronto (6th with 11,984 AI talent), Vancouver (8th with 6,880) and Montreal (10th with 5,777).
The tech industry employed 48% of total AI-specialty talent in the U.S. and 46% in Canada–the most in each country, according to CBRE.
“The most significant indicators for any market’s potential growth of AI-specialty talent are the presence of universities with established AI education programs, major technology companies developing AI and available venture capital funding,” it says.
The San Francisco Bay Area dominates for these indicators, attracting more than half of U.S. AI venture capital funding, most of the country’s largest start-up AI companies and two of the top five university AI programs, according to U.S. News & World Report. Seattle, New York Metro, Boston, Los Angeles, Toronto and Washington, D.C. also have many of these growth indicators, according to the report.
“Existing tech talent workforces are rapidly upskilling to include AI development skills as companies across all industries deploy this new technology. Thus, AI-skilled tech talent will remain in high demand,” says CBRE.
Generative artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is now more widely implemented in global organizations compared to other AI applications, according to a previous report from WEKA and S&P Global Market Intelligence.
