Three Patterns in the Supply of Student Jobs in Canada: A View from Intern Insider
An analysis of nearly 30,000 Canadian student job postings reveals three patterns: opportunity concentrates heavily in big cities, applied and professional fields dominate demand, and soft skills outrank technical ones.
Ashkan Yazdi Zadeh & Roger Pizarro Milian, PhD
6 min read
Nearly every indicator tells us that landing a job has become increasingly difficult for post-secondary graduates. In today's job market, horror stories about recent grads spending months unemployed or underemployed, sending out hundreds of applications into the void, are becoming commonplace. Broader youth unemployment rates, as reported by Statistics Canada (2026), have also reached worrisome levels. And there is little indication that the labour market will bounce back soon.
One factor that has been demonstrated to smoothen labour market entry for graduates is the possession of work experience. Analyses of Statistics Canada's data (e.g., Pizarro Milian et al., 2022; Wyonch, 2020) have consistently shown that university graduates who participate in work placements (e.g., co-op, internships) during their studies outperform counterparts who don't, even after controlling for demographics, field of study, and other characteristics.
Despite the value of gaining work experience, very little is known about the supply of student job opportunities (e.g., internships, co-op) in Canada. In the absence of this information, financial investments made by federal and provincial governments to promote youth skills development through work-integrated learning and other job experiences cannot be strategically targeted to ensure either maximum or equitable impact.
Through this article we present findings from a preliminary analysis of nearly 30,000 student jobs posted on Intern Insider from March 2025 to May 2026. Our intent is to kickstart a dialogue about the supply of student jobs in Canada, along with the value of timely reporting on its characteristics.
About the data#
Intern Insider is one of the largest student job boards in North America. The platform monitors the career pages of 200,000+ companies every 15 minutes to detect newly posted roles. AI technologies are leveraged to filter postings and extract structured data from them, including required skills or majors, employer, geographical location, and more.
What do we see through Intern Insider postings? There are three key trends that we believe are of importance to contemporary policy discourse in Canada.
Sizable geographical imbalances#
There are massive disparities in the availability of student job opportunities across Canada. Nearly a quarter (23%) of all postings list Toronto as a potential work location. Other major metropolitan centers, such as Montreal (7%), Calgary (6%), Vancouver (6%), and Ottawa (5%), were also cited in a substantial share of job advertisements. Collectively, these metropolitan areas were listed on nearly half of all job ads. But elsewhere, in smaller cities like North Bay (Ontario), Moncton (New Brunswick), Red Deer (Alberta), or Brandon (Manitoba), student opportunities were extremely limited, with each city being listed on fewer than 0.25% of all advertisements.
These geographical patterns will come as no surprise to those familiar with broader job vacancy data. Statistics Canada's (2026) own Job Vacancy & Wage Survey (JVWS), the current gold standard when it comes to tracking job opportunities in Canada, shows that job vacancies are heavily concentrated in large urban regions. For example, the Toronto and Ottawa economic regions alone have more job vacancies than the rest of Ontario combined.
Applied and professional fields dominate#
Demand is greatest for students in applied or professionally oriented domains. This includes the likes of Business Administration (40%), Computer Science (26%), Finance (17%), Computer Engineering (17%), Electrical Engineering (17%), Mechanical Engineering (16%), Data Science (14%), and Marketing (14%). By comparison, liberal arts majors in fields like Anthropology, Philosophy, History, English, Journalism, and International Relations were hardly represented in the data, with each field being present in no more than 1% of all job ads.
These trends are generally consistent with those reported by Statistics Canada using the National Graduates Survey (e.g., Galarneau et al., 2020; Rodriguez et al., 2016), which suggest that students in more professionally oriented fields (e.g., engineering, health) have higher work-integrated learning participation rates than their counterparts in the humanities.
Soft skills are essential#
While the most sought-after credentials were in applied and professionally oriented fields, it was "soft" skills that appeared most regularly across job advertisements. We are talking here about the likes of communication (36%), collaboration (28%), project management (24%), and problem solving (24%) skills. By comparison, even the most popular technical skills, such as Python (11%), SQL (6%), Power BI (4%), or Machine Learning (4%), were only referenced in a small share of job advertisements.
These trends reflect the longstanding belief that, despite the overwhelming focus on technical fields in policy discourse, employers place a strong premium on generic skill sets when hiring students and recent grads that lie outside the formal curriculum (e.g., Borwein, 2014).
So what?#
Understanding the supply of student job opportunities in Canada is essential to developing policy strategies to promote equitable access to skills development and ensure the long-term vitality of our workforce.
The strong spatial concentration of student job opportunities in urban hubs highlights the potential need for targeted investments in northern and remote communities. In the absence of local opportunities, students in these underserved regions may end up moving to urban hubs in search of opportunities and creating professional networks that predispose them to leave after graduation. The absence of local student jobs could also augment northern and rural youth's higher propensity to be neither in education, employment, or training (NEET) (Hango, Zarifa, & Seward, 2021).
The lack of student job opportunities in the liberal arts also serves as a hindrance to skills development for students in these program areas. These are the fields where these opportunities are arguably needed the most, as they are typically not tightly linked to a set of occupations in the same way as engineering, nursing, or other professional programs. Liberal arts graduates are known to experience poorer early labour market outcomes, ranging from low earnings to poor education-job match (e.g., Reid et al., 2020). Greater early exposure to the world of work can only help liberal arts graduates.
The common referencing of soft skills across job ads is perhaps most difficult to interpret. On the one hand, it is certainly possible that generic soft skills are ritualistically embedded into job ads, whereas technical skills are more position-specific. This could explain the disparity we observe. At the same time, it is difficult to ignore that employer surveys have consistently pointed to a soft-skills deficiency among recent graduates. The relative demand for soft skills will likely only increase as AI technologies automate a growing list of tasks that previously required technical expertise. In light of this, it would be prudent for students to hedge their bets by being intentional when it comes to developing these skills, hopefully with the support of their institutions. In the long run, these uniquely human capacities may be the most "future-proof" competencies we can help them develop.
A note for universities. Intern Insider works with co-op and career teams across Canada, including at the University of British Columbia, the University of Manitoba, Thompson Rivers University, and the University of Fraser Valley on exactly the problems this article describes: developing more job opportunities for students and scaling employer outreach. If that's part of your work, you can learn more about partnering with us.
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