More than 15k Indian tech workers came to Canada over past 12 months: Report

India formed the largest cohort of global tech industry workers who flocked to Canada between April 2022 and March 2023, according to a recent report from The Technology Councils of North America (TECNA) and Canada's Tech Network (CTN).

Out of more than 32,000 tech workers, 15,097 came from India, followed by 1,808 from Nigeria, partly due to Canada's immigration-friendly national policy and labor cost advantage, the report said.

Mississauga, home to nearly 1,000 IT companies with over 300,000 tech professionals, and Montreal, where tech ecosystems have grown around 31 per cent from 2015 to 2020, were among the top Canadian cities to tap the talent.

"The large migration of tech workers fills the need for skilled workers amid an ongoing global talent shortage and points to a hopeful and prosperous future for Canada's tech occupation workforce," the report titled 'Tech Workforce Trends: The Migration of Tech Workers and Tech Jobs Since The Pandemic', said.

According to migration findings, a total of 1,900 tech workers from across the world came to Mississauga and 959 came to Montreal from April 2022-March 2023.

While the global net in-migration of tech talent came primarily from India, Nigeria, and Brazil, Canada is also gaining American talent, which includes Indians, from major US cities like Washington D.C., Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia, the report said.

In a bid to attract top tech talent to the country, Canada has started giving open work permits for H1-B visa holders from the US.

Indians, who account for nearly 75 per cent of H1-B visa holders in the US, will be the major beneficiaries of this scheme.

Canada's tech ecosystem is on the fast track to immense growth according to a recent industry outlook report from the Business Development Bank of Canada.

Revenues in the tech sector grew at an average annual pace of 9.4 per cent between 2015 and 2020, and in 2022, Canada had more than 400,000 software developers in the country.

The report also found that the most sought-after tech skills in Canada include customer experience, Microsoft Azure, analytical skills, Amazon web services, Jira, data science, GitHub, and Customer Relationship Management.