The digital economy has quietly stopped being a sector. New research from Canada’s Information and Communications Technology Council (ICTC), released 8 October 2026, puts the country’s digital workforce at 2.7 million people as of June 2026 — 12.7 percent of all workers, roughly one in eight jobs. The striking part is where those workers sit: software developers now work inside banks and energy companies; hospitals, professional services firms and construction companies all employ people doing digital work that a narrower definition would miss entirely.
About 2.5 million of the total work in one of 55 formal digital occupations. The remaining 200,000 or so hold non-digital titles inside digital economy sectors — the project managers, analysts and operations people whose jobs exist because the digital layer does.
The growth gap
The numbers tell a story of two labour markets. Statistics Canada’s Labour Force Survey recorded national employment growth of 99,000 jobs, or 0.5 percent, in the year to June 2026. CompTIA’s State of the Tech Workforce Canada 2026 projects net tech employment rising 1.8 percent this year to about 1.54 million workers. CBRE’s Scoring Tech Talent 2026 found Canadian tech talent employment grew 7.6 percent — 91,300 jobs — in 2025.
Each organisation counts differently, so the figures aren’t directly comparable. But the direction agrees: digital work is compounding faster than the wider labour market.
“Technology is fueling economic growth, but Canada’s talent pipeline isn’t keeping pace,” Gary Mofford, Canada account director at CompTIA, told HRD Canada. He warned that without faster workforce training, innovation and competitiveness could suffer.
The two-speed pattern will look familiar to anyone tracking the same split elsewhere: India’s Naukri JobSpeak data showed AI hiring growing 20 percent year-on-year in September while overall white-collar hiring rose just 2 percent (covered here). Digital demand is not the whole labour market — it’s the fast lane inside it.
ICTC’s chief research and communications officer Anne Patterson framed the payoff as conditional: Canada’s ability to compete depends on how effectively businesses adopt technology, workers develop the skills to use it, and those investments translate into productivity.
The new toolkit: AI scores and readiness gaps
The rebuilt ICTC framework sorts digital occupations into four tiers — core digital, digital-enabled, digital-adjacent and digital-intensive — and adds more than 50 indicators, including an AI Impact Score and an AI Readiness Gap metric. Those two measures, ICTC says, track something Canadian official statistics currently don’t: how exposed each job is to AI and how prepared the workforce is for it.
That matters for job-seekers because the most in-demand roles ICTC has identified — software engineers, data scientists, computer and information systems managers, cybersecurity specialists — increasingly sit outside the technology sector. A cybersecurity specialist at a hospital and one at a software company may share a title but face entirely different hiring pipelines.
The honest asterisk
The timing deserves a caveat. Canada’s wider labour market has been softening — TD Economics recorded the economy losing 68,000 jobs in September alone, well below expectations. The digital workforce’s rise is real, but it’s happening inside an economy where headline employment is shrinking in some months. Digital work is growing faster than everything else; it is not growing fast enough to carry the whole labour market on its own.
What this means for New Zealand
New Zealand doesn’t publish an official digital-workforce count with the same methodology, which is precisely the point. Canada’s framework tries to measure digital work wherever it happens — not just at tech companies. For a New Zealand economy where every major bank, district health board, and construction firm now runs its own software and data teams, that’s the measurement gap: our digital workers are everywhere except in the statistics.
The useful takeaway for workers is that “digital jobs” no longer means moving to a tech company. The roles are spreading outward, and the spread is the growth story — software people inside banks, energy firms, hospitals. For career changers, that’s genuine good news: the entry route may run through the industry you’re already in. (Not everyone is heading the same direction, mind — a minority of young workers are deliberately moving away from digital work into heritage trades they see as more AI-proof.)
Sources: ICTC report released 8 October 2026 (per HRD Canada); Statistics Canada Labour Force Survey; CompTIA State of the Tech Workforce Canada 2026; CBRE Scoring Tech Talent 2026; TD Economics. Figures use different definitions of digital/tech work and are not directly comparable. September 2026 employment decline per TD Economics analysis of Statistics Canada data.
— CJ Murden, editor of Singularity.Kiwi. Former digital technologies teacher, author of AI-focused books. Writing with a New Zealand focus.
FAQ
How many digital workers does Canada have? ICTC estimates Canada’s digital workforce at 2.7 million people as of June 2026 — 12.7 percent of all workers, or about one in eight jobs.
Are digital jobs only in tech companies? No. ICTC found software developers working in banking and energy, with healthcare, professional services and construction all employing digital workers — a major reason the definition was modernised.
How fast is digital employment growing in Canada? CompTIA projects net tech employment up 1.8% in 2026, and CBRE found tech talent employment grew 7.6% in 2025 — faster than the 0.5% national employment growth in the year to June 2026.
Does New Zealand track digital workforce numbers? New Zealand has no equivalent published count with ICTC’s methodology tracking digital work across all industries — a measurement gap as digital roles spread beyond the tech sector.
