AI Analysis: Employment by occupation, monthly, seasonally adjusted, last 5 months

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 14100310 tracks monthly seasonally adjusted employment across 11 National Occupational Classification (NOC) categories from January 1987 to March 2026, capturing nearly four decades of Canadian labour market shifts. Total employment grew approximately 74% over this period — from 12,102K to 21,051K persons — with most occupation categories moving in strong positive correlation, reflecting shared exposure to broad macroeconomic cycles. The data reveals a highly right-skewed distribution driven by large aggregate categories, while standard errors remain consistently tight, confirming reliable measurement precision across all occupation groups.

Key Findings

• Total employed persons in Canada grew from approximately 12,102K in January 1987 to 21,051K in March 2026 — a ~74% increase over 39 years — with an all-time peak of 21,146K persons.
• The dataset contains 20,724 rows across 471 monthly observations and 44 unique time series, covering 11 NOC occupation categories each tracked with 4 statistic types (estimate plus three standard error measures).
• Employment estimates are heavily right-skewed: the mean estimate is 2,937.97K persons versus a median of 1,570K, driven by large aggregate categories ranging from 254.3K to 21,146.0K persons.
• Standard errors are small and consistent relative to estimates — month-to-month change errors average just 19.80K and year-over-year errors average 37.85K — indicating high measurement precision across all occupation groups.
• Most occupation categories show strong positive correlations with one another, reflecting that broad macroeconomic cycles simultaneously affect all sectors, with 'Total employed, all occupations' serving as a highly correlated benchmark for all sub-categories.
• Outlier detection using a 3 standard deviation threshold on month-over-month percentage changes identified the most statistically extreme employment shifts across occupations, with the long 1987–2026 baseline enabling reliable separation of true anomalies from normal variation.
• The top-ranked occupations by average employment over the last 5 months — likely Sales & Service and Business, Finance & Administration — dwarf the bottom-ranked categories, illustrating the wide structural disparity in occupational employment size across Canada's labour market.