With the hiring of 30,000 professionals since 2016 and, above all, a 15.7% jump during the pandemic, Montreal is establishing itself as the champion of the growth of the information technology (IT) sector among 14 northern metropolises. -american.
Behind the good news, however, lie two negative notes: the scarcity of labor will worsen and the presence of women remains marginal.
These are some of the highlights of a study published Wednesday by the Institut du Québec (IDQ), a non-profit organization resulting from a partnership between HEC Montreal and the Conference Board of Canada. We compared Montreal with 13 other cities of similar size and with a comparable IT sector. It includes Boston, San Francisco and Seattle in the United States, as well as Toronto and Vancouver in Canada.
PHOTO YVES LACOMBE, PROVIDED BY IDQ
Emna Braham, Deputy Director of the Institut du Québec
“Job growth for IT professionals accelerated during the pandemic,” says Emna Braham, Deputy Director of the IDQ. Before, we saw Montreal in the middle of the pack in terms of size and growth […] Then there was a jump, and everything indicates that the demand for these professionals will increase. ”
From the 8e at the 1D square
Montreal is in 9e position with 163,800 IT professionals in 2020, the first being occupied by Washington with 351,540 jobs. 18 occupations were selected for this category, all related to IT, ranging from multimedia developers to installers of telecommunications equipment.
The hourly wage for all IT was set at $ 33.05 in 2020. No comparison with the other 13 cities has been made on this subject in this report.
For the Quebec metropolis, IT jobs represented 6.6% of total employment on average between 2016 and 2020. During this period, the average growth rate of this sector was 3.5% per year, this which places Montreal in eighth position. But suddenly, from 2019 to the end of 2020, growth was 15.7%, the largest of the 14 cities.
Of all the positions, those of “electronic and electrical engineering technologists and technicians” experienced the largest annual increase from 2016 to 2020, with 15.5%. Analysts and database administrators come second with 13.8%.
These statistics would probably have been better if the number of vacancies had not increased in parallel. There were 4,958 in early 2020, a vacancy rate of 2.7% still lower than all jobs, which was 3.3%.
Women wanted
What worries the IDQ is that the trend is more pronounced in IT, as the number of vacancies increased by 31.8% each year between 2016 and 2020, against 24.8% for the whole. economy.
In short, the IT sector should join and overtake the rest of the economy in this regard in the coming years, believes Mr.me Braham. “Everything indicates that demand will increase. Already, half of the professions identified in IT are in short supply. It is therefore very important to keep an eye on the scarcity of labor. ”
The average hourly wage offered for vacant IT positions in Montreal was $ 32 in 2020, compared to $ 21 in the economy as a whole. The wages offered are lower than in Toronto ($ 38 and $ 24 overall) and Vancouver ($ 36 and $ 23), a difference that is explained mainly by the lower cost of living in Montreal.
We also note the persistence of a phenomenon that affects practically all IT professions, the minority presence of women, who represented only 19% of employees in 2020. This is a notable increase since 2006, when ‘They represented 12%, but Montreal does less well in this regard than Toronto and Vancouver, where women represent 22% of the whole.
“It will really be a challenge, it is a pool that must be sought”, estimates Mme Braham.