A cellist who trained to be coder. Transition teacher to sales. A hotel worker who moved to public service. There are stories of people changing careers during the pandemic well documented.
That’s how it is a terrible shortage of workers in some sectors, with help-seeking signs posted in the windows of countless restaurants and grocery stores.
Statistics Canada data analyzed by CBC News backs that up, showing migration among workers between sectors, from service and food-processing jobs to potentially more lucrative positions in fields such as technology, finance and real estate.
Amanda Ryan, who lives in Moncton, NB, had her own cleaning business until last year when she decided to become a realtor.
“I had a cleaning business for a long time and my body started to feel the effects of cleaning all the time,” said Ryan, a mother of two.
“I was trying to create something that I could do when I couldn’t clean anymore, and I thought that with knowing the houses and being able to build my own business, doing real estate would probably be successful.”
A year later, Ryan said the job was challenging but also rewarding. And better pay.
Such career changes have taken place amid a tightening labor market, resulting in staff shortages in sectors that workers have left behind. Overall, Canada unemployment remained at 4.9%, the lowest level since 1970.
Examining the data also reveals a longer-term shift in the country’s labor market, driven not only by the transformative past two years, but also by demographic shifts that have been underway for decades.
Here are five charts that help illustrate Canada’s changing labor landscape:
The chart above shows the dramatic shift of workers toward certain sectors, such as public administration and real estate, and away from others, such as food services.
Fabian Lange, a labor economist at McGill University in Montreal who reviewed the CBC charts, said many workers appear to be moving up the “job ladder” to industries with better pay and benefits, a phenomenon he is in the process of documenting in the United States.
“We see this at the individual level. We’re seeing people from lodging and food services where they’re not going straight into finance, insurance, real estate, but they’re going to go into maybe manufacturing or … maybe healthcare consulting,” he said.
“They will move to jobs that are higher up the wage ladder, that are better quality jobs. And those with higher-quality jobs tend to move up that so-called labor ladder.”
Against this tight labor market, hourly wages offered have increased significantly in certain sectors – such as technical and information services, as seen in the chart above.
Meanwhile, wages in other fields, such as manufacturing, food service and retail, continue to lag.
In fact, taking into account the rising cost of living, some of these sectors have seen their average wage offered drop during the pandemic, Lange said.
Persistently low wages in some sectors are surprising, he said, at least from a supply and demand perspective.
“The labor market is tight right now, and what that suggests is that it’s a seller’s market,” Lange said.
“Workers need to be in a strong position in this labor market, and we need to see that in compensation. And we haven’t seen that many [increase] as a compensation.”
The data also suggests, as seen in the chart above, that an increasing number of workers are leaving their jobs because they are unhappy – and now have other options in the labor market.
Almost twice as many workers left their jobs for this reason last month than in July 2021, far outstripping other stated reasons such as going to school or retirement.
Brittany Feore, an economist with the Labor Market Information Council, said encouraging younger people, such as students, into higher-paying and part-time positions could help address labor shortages, as well the increase in immigration.
“Enticing some of these people after retirement to return to the workforce is another solution,” she said.
In many ways, Lange said, the tight labor market looks like what was already expected before March 2020 — although the pandemic appears to have caused some older people to leave the labor market earlier, as seen in the chart above.
“I think it’s related to the pandemic, in the sense that people retired early … so maybe they had a plan to retire when they were 63, but the pandemic hit in March 2020,” he said .
“They’re leaving their jobs, maybe they’re afraid to go back to work at 61,” Lange said. “A year later, the economy is recovering, but they’ve decided … they’re just going to retire and move their retirement up.”
But the leading factor driving down the labor force participation rate seen in the graph above is the country’s changing demographics.
A a recent report from BMO examined the effect of the country’s aging population on the workforce and emphasized that this trend began long before the pandemic.
“It is critical to note that this continued slow decline is almost entirely a function of underlying demographics — that is, a rapidly growing share of the population in retirement age groups — and less related to people leaving the workforce for other reasons,” the report says.
“While this demographic drain on the workforce has been coming full speed ahead, the pandemic appears to have created at least some additional disruption through earlier retirements, lifestyle changes and job changes.”
The report concludes that, in the long term, “the demographic slowdown in labor supply will continue” in the coming years.
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