As with so many countries around the world, Canada’s labour market is changing at an astonishing pace. For those seeking to understand what’s happening, the question is: where do I look? For organizations tasked with helping people navigate these changes, the question is: how do we get up-to-date, detailed labour market information (LMI) into the hands of the people who need it?

This was the challenge facing the Labour Market Information Council (LMIC) / Conseil de l'information sur le marché du travail (CIMT), a not-for-profit organization based in Ottawa, Canada.

Its mission is “to empower Canadians to make informed decisions by enabling access to quality, relevant and comprehensive data and insights across the pan-Canadian LMI ecosystem.” But in a world where work is evolving so rapidly, delivering on that mission – and ensuring that its stakeholders, including policymakers, employers, educators, career practitioners, and job seekers, have the information and insights they need – has become harder than ever.

The Need

Getting Timely Data to More People

The challenge facing LMIC was twofold: first, how to find timely, local, and granular labour market data; second, how to present this data in a way that stakeholders could easily access, understand, and use.

LMIC began by piloting its own dashboard using online job posting data. The pilot produced both positive results and important lessons. Strong initial demand for the tool validated the concept and demonstrated a clear appetite for this kind of information. At the same time, the pilot exposed limitations in the underlying infrastructure, highlighting the need for a solution that was more robust, scalable, and sustainable.

The organization therefore needed both the timely, detailed data it was looking for and a scalable way to turn that data into actionable insights its audiences could actually use.

"We continually hear that people want more timely, local, and detailed LMI, but that kind of data isn’t always easy to find or use. That was really the starting point for the dashboard. Lightcast helped us get to a place where we could take all of that job posting data and put it in front of our audience in a way that’s manageable for us and useful to them."

The Solution

Combining Quality With Accessibility

Following the pilot, LMIC undertook a broad assessment of potential data providers and dashboard technologies.

On the data front, the organization’s data scientists and engineers evaluated online job posting datasets, giving particular attention to accuracy and representativeness. On the presentation side, LMIC considered the tooling required to transform that data into a useful, intuitive public-facing resource.

That assessment led LMIC to Lightcast.

Lightcast provided both the detailed, high-quality job posting data LMIC was looking for and a custom dashboard through which to showcase it. The dashboard not only presents the data in an engaging, accessible way, but also reduces the technical burden on the LMIC team. This was particularly important for an organization of LMIC’s size. While it had data science and engineering expertise in-house, it needed a plug-and-play solution that did not require its team to build and maintain every element of the infrastructure themselves.

The Dashboard

From National Trends to Local Insights

The result is the Canadian Job Trends Dashboard (CJTD) – an interactive dashboard that presents Lightcast’s near real-time job posting data through an accessible interface. Users can explore employer demand across Canada, with the ability to dig deeper into individual regions and occupations. The dashboard provides three ways to explore the data:

Region Overview provides an overall snapshot of employer demand across Canadian provinces and territories over timeframes ranging from one month to a year. Within this report, users can see both total job postings and postings growth, along with the in-demand hard skills, socio-emotional skills, software skills, and certifications.

Custom Search allows users to investigate the market in greater detail, filtering by individual occupations, minimum education level, and ESDC skills and competencies. Metrics include job postings by industry and educational attainment, along with skills. Importantly, median advertised salaries are also included.

Postings Map adds a geographic dimension to the insights, allowing users to select an occupation and timeframe and explore where job postings are concentrated on an interactive map. A supporting table below also shows posting volumes in each of these areas and median advertised salaries by geography.

The Impact

Making Data More Actionable

One of the main advantages of online job posting data is its timeliness. Unlike some traditional labour market sources, the dashboard is continually refreshed to capture changes in employer demand.

However, LMIC rightly emphasizes that online job postings are not a one-for-one proxy for official vacancy statistics. Instead, the main strength of the dashboard is that it provides another lens through which users can understand the labour market, including emerging skills trends that may not yet be visible in occupational classifications that update less frequently. That makes the information particularly useful for people who need to translate labour market changes into practical guidance.

Career development practitioners, for example, are using the dashboard to understand which skills employers are requesting, which then informs the conversations they have with clients about education, training, career choices, and how they present their skills to employers.

Post-secondary institutions, many of which have lacked the resources or analytical capacity to access and analyze this kind of data, now have access to a more current view of employer demand, which can help inform curriculum planning.

The dashboard is also supporting LMIC’s broader role as a knowledge broker for other stakeholders. Because the data is continually refreshed, users have a reason to return, helping LMIC engage existing audiences while introducing new audiences to labour market information.

"For me, the value is really in making this information available to people who need it. Not every college, career development practitioner, or workforce organization has the capacity to purchase and analyze job-posting data themselves. Working with Lightcast, we can give them access to that information through the Canadian Job Trends Dashboard in a way that’s much easier to work with and apply to the decisions they’re making."

The Outcomes

Expanding Access and Extending Reach

The Canadian Job Trends Dashboard has become an important entry point into LMIC’s wider ecosystem of research, data, and tools. Early usage figures demonstrate the scale of its reach. From March to August 2026, LMIC recorded the following:

Of the new registrations, this included people from 10 provinces and the Yukon, and more than half coming from outside Ontario

LMIC is now working to understand the dashboard’s longer-term impact in greater depth through product surveys and improved audience measurement. Early feedback, however, points to the value users place on the frequency of the data, its usability, and access to information that many organizations and practitioners previously struggled to obtain.

For a team of 12, the dashboard provides a way to extend LMIC’s reach far beyond the organization itself, while supporting its core mandate: making high-quality labour market information more accessible and useful to Canadians.

"The Canadian Job Trends Dashboard, powered by Lightcast job posting data, is a really great way for us to reach people who might not otherwise come across LMIC. They might come in looking for information on an occupation or the skills employers are asking for and then start exploring our other tools and research – which is exactly what we want. We want people to find the LMI they need and then realize there’s a lot more here that can help them."