These numbers also serve as a warning. The demand for those workers is outrunning our ability to prepare them. The gap is widening fast.

CompTIA's IT Industry Outlook 2026 puts hard numbers to what employers across Canada already know. AI related job postings have more than doubled year-over-year. Nearly 94 percent of companies say they intend to invest in AI specific training yet roughly 70 percent still describe themselves as being in the early stages of AI adoption. The bottleneck is not ambition. It is qualified people. Demand for cybersecurity, data, cloud and AI skills is growing across every industry. Meanwhile, almost half of organizations report being caught in a cycle where they delay training because adoption is immature, and adoption stalls because workers lack the skills. Someone has to break that loop.

Minister Evan Solomon’s AI strategy recognizes that AI alone will not drive growth; skilled workers will. AI may create opportunity, but people create productivity. 

Without a skilled workforce, even the most generously funded innovation agenda will stall. Meeting this challenge requires every part of Canada's post-secondary ecosystem, universities, community colleges, polytechnics, regulated career colleges and ecosystem, universities to work as a connected system rather than a collection of competing institutions. 

Career colleges have a particular role to play here. For more than 160 years, they have focused on a single mission: employment-ready graduates. Their connection to employers is not incidental, it is structural. Working with certification partners like CompTIA, career colleges help ensure graduates carry credentials that employers recognize, in fields that reflect the labour market of today rather than the curriculum committee of five years ago.

But strong institutions cannot compensate for a slow system. One of Canada's least discussed economic liabilities is regulatory lag. Provincial bodies responsible for approving new programs are doing essential work protecting students and maintaining quality. Yet when those departments are under-resourced approvals stall, and the time between emerging employer demand and available training stretches into years. By the time a new cybersecurity or AI program clears approval, the skills it addresses may have already evolved. Well-resourced, modernized regulatory departments are not administrative overhead. They are essential economic infrastructure.

Student financial assistance must also follow the learner, not the institution type. Canadians seeking the fastest, most relevant path to employment deserve access to funding regardless of whether their training is delivered by a university, a polytechnic or a regulated private career college. Restricting that access does not protect students, but it limits their options and slows workforce growth.

None of this works without a genuine commitment to lifelong learning. CompTIA's research is direct on this point: training existing employees is the preferred and most productive approach to closing skills gaps. Companies that combine upskilling with industry-recognized certifications see the strongest results. Canada's post-secondary system was built for the school to first job transition. The economy now demands more flexible, stackable, employer-connected learning that supports workers throughout their careers, not just at the start of them.

Canada has the learners, the institutions and the employers. What is missing is the policy alignment to let them work together effectively through a national workforce strategy that connects education, immigration, labour market planning and economic development as a single coordinated effort rather than parallel provincial and federal programs talking past one another.

Countries that invest in workforce development, regulatory excellence and lifelong learning will attract investment, strengthen productivity and build better jobs. Canada can lead. But only if we act on a simple truth:Our greatest competitive advantage is not artificial intelligence. It is the people we prepare to use it.

Michael Sangster is CEO of the National Association of Career Colleges (NACC). This piece draws CompTIA's IT Industry Outlook 2026.

The views expressed are those of the author(s). National Newswatch Inc. publishes a range of perspectives and does not necessarily endorse the opinions presented.