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Toronto is the fastest-growing tech market in North America

Toronto moved up from 12th place to sixth in the CBRE’s Tech Talent Report, an evaluation of tech talent in 50 major Canadian and U.S. markets. The rapid jump occurred thanks to a major increase in the city’s tech talent employment base. Companies are flocking to high quality talent, and Toronto added 22,500 tech jobs between 2015 and 2016.

The tech talent market in Toronto is the fourth largest in North America — 212,000, making up eight percent of the total labor market, up from 6.9 percent in 2015. The proportion of millennials, a key ingredient in high quality tech talent, joining Toronto’s tech market also grew by close to ten percent between 2010 and 2015.

Canada’s financial and innovation capital also offers companies an affordable location to operate, second only to Vancouver in terms of the cost to obtain high quality tech talent.

Toronto’s Mayor John Tory is all in when it comes to promoting the city’s up-and-coming status as a technology capital and its incredibly diverse talent pool. At a recent launch event for technology festival Elevate Toronto, Tory lauded the city’s assets as a destination for technology businesses — from the tech talent, to the business innovation going on in the city, it’s just a question of getting people to see it.

“It’s time to showcase all of this. You have to bring people here to see it,” said Tory. “Together we’re going to be stronger — in sending that message out about the talent pool here, about our embracing of disruption, and about our values.”

Reports like the Tech Talent scorecard from the CBRE will certainly help Toronto in its efforts to gain the world stage as a tech leader. In the CBRE’s press release on the Tech Talent Report, Werner Dietl, Executive Vice President and GTA Regional Managing Director of CBRE Canada said that Toronto’s tech leadership is starting to show.

“Toronto is a becoming a leader in producing a world-class tech talent, particularly in the artificial intelligence field, and there had been an incredible rate of growth in our tech labour force in the past year. When you consider we’ve added more tech jobs from 2015 to 2016 than New York and the San Francisco Bay area combined, it shows just how vibrant Toronto’s tech industry has become. Tech companies now comprise over 20 per cent of all current office space demand in the city.”

Another sign of the changing stature for the city is that Toronto was chosen as the first North American location of luxury car brand INFINITI’s accelerator program Lab. Rover Parking and NXCAR were both selected from eight prominent startups in early development to work closely with INFINITI to develop their businesses and hopefully become a part of the luxury car company’s plans for the future.

If Toronto can build on the last year’s promising growth in tech, and continue to attract interest from business groups and accelerators like INFINITI Lab, the city could witness a massive shift in its global standing.

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