Python leads 598 postings, but Sales Enablement isn't far behind

The top of the list

Across the 598 postings we track, five skills separate themselves from the rest: Python (138 postings), Sales Enablement (115), Product Management (112), Outbound Prospecting (104) and Machine Learning (103). No other skill clears 100 mentions. That these five span both technical and commercial work is not an accident — it maps directly onto the catalogue's category mix, where Sales (159 postings) and Engineering (143) are the two largest groups, followed closely by Data & AI (116).

Python's breadth versus Sales Enablement's concentration

Python's 138 mentions look broad-based: Engineering, Data & AI, ML Engineering & Infrastructure, Data Science & ML, Data Engineering and Backend all draw on it, and those six categories alone total well over 300 postings in our catalogue. It is hard to point to one or two employers as the sole driver.

Sales Enablement's 115 mentions read differently. Sales is our single largest category at 159 postings, and Account Executive (36) and Sales Development (22) sit alongside it. Neo Financial (94 open postings) and Wealthsimple (39) are both consumer-finance companies with large go-to-market teams, and between the two of them they account for a substantial share of our catalogue's commercial roles. Sales Enablement's rank owes more to a handful of employers building out large sales organizations than to the skill being universally requested in the way Python is.

Machine Learning's rank is an employer story

Machine Learning's 103 mentions, and the related cluster of Large Language Models (73), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (28) and PyTorch (23), line up closely with two employers: Cohere (93 open postings) and Tenstorrent (53 open postings). Cohere builds language models for a living and Tenstorrent builds chips aimed at AI workloads, so between them they carry a disproportionate share of our ML-related postings. Remove those two companies from the picture and the ML skill cluster would look far thinner. This is the clearest case in our data of a skill's ranking being driven by one or two large employers rather than by broad demand across the catalogue.

Outbound Prospecting and the sales stack

Outbound Prospecting (104) and Account Management (77) round out the commercial skill set, alongside Negotiation (57) and Salesforce (40). Combined with Sales Enablement, these numbers describe a catalogue where sales tooling and process — not just the product being sold — is treated as a distinct, in-demand skill set. Retail Sales (69) is a separate line item, tied closely to our Retail & Store Sales category (73 postings), and does not overlap much with the enterprise sales skills above.

The infrastructure layer

Below the top five, a second tier of skills describes the infrastructure work behind both the ML and Engineering categories: Distributed Systems (80), SQL (78), Observability & Monitoring (70), AWS (63), Kubernetes (59) and CI/CD (54). These are broadly distributed across Backend (56), DevOps & SRE (23) and Security Engineering (23), rather than concentrated in one or two employers, which is why they don't fall off as sharply as the ML cluster does.

What the ranking doesn't say

Only 11 of our 598 postings state a salary range at all, so none of this skill data can be tied to what these skills pay across the catalogue. The counts describe how often a skill is named in posting text, not how much employers are willing to offer for it, and not how common it is in the wider Canadian labour market — only in the 598 postings we currently hold from 20 companies.