A recent report from the Brookfield Institute for Innovation + Entrepreneurship confirmed what a lot of IT experts already knew: Canada is a hotbed of developer talent.
And though there is some question as to which Canadian city occupies the runner-up position for the best place to find this talent — some say it’s Vancouver, while others tout Ottawa — the undisputed leader is Toronto. According to data pulled from Stack Overflow, the largest software developer online community, Toronto is home to over 32 percent of the country’s dev talent, and ranks 13th globally.
Toronto’s impressive tech talent pool is one of the reasons Forbes named the city the second best place in the world to create a tech startup. Not surprisingly, the demand for Toronto’s developer talent is at an all-time high. “The demand for Toronto is incredible,” said Cameron McWatt, a recruiter with Randstad Technologies. Development gigs are now outpacing even traditional heavy-demand areas like infrastructure, McWatt points out, with openings that span industries, including banking, insurance, healthcare, government, and telecom.
With an average of over 3,900 active tech listings, Toronto developers looking to switch jobs are finding it’s a buyer’s market, and an ideal time to go in search of their dream gig. Tyler Lyn, a self-employed Java developer, decided that he needed more experience with enterprise software to advance his career, but was wary of the project micro-management he had endured in the past.
Lyn found there was no shortage of enterprise opportunities that paid well, but he was determined to find one that would give him exposure to Python, and Django Web Framework, the two technologies he wanted to work with. After consulting with a Randstad recruiter, Lyn landed a job as web developer at a major retail company. “It’s been worth it,” Lyn said of his experience. “It’s important to find work that is meaningful towards your career growth.”
Currently, Javascript frameworks like Angular, Node, and React are the most in-demand skills according to McWatt, which he said is a significant change from even five years ago, when Ruby and Python jobs were dominating the city’s development roles. Keeping up with these shifts in stack demand can be challenging. “In general, companies are pretty rigid on wanting to hire someone who’s been hands-on with the tech stack that they have,” McWatt said. “It really is an uphill battle if you want to switch to something new.” But not impossible.
“We get students that are looking to upgrade their skills to a more modern web technology stack,” said Carmen Tsang, a career services manager at Lighthouse Labs, a Canadian coding bootcamp, whose full stack curriculum covers many of the frameworks that McWatt identified as being in-demand.
McWatt has this advice for devs looking to show off their tech skills, but who may not have work experience to lean on: “Having an active GitHub or Bitbucket account with a handful of complex projects that you’ve worked on, goes a long way, especially with smaller to medium companies,” he said.
Image Credit: Unsplash
Source: Randstad
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