The COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to massive
rates of unemployment and greater uncertainty in the job market.
There is a growing need for data-driven tools and analyses
to better inform the public on trends within the job market.
In particular, obtaining a “snapshot” of available employment
opportunities mid-pandemic promises insights to inform policy
and support retraining programs. In this work, we combine data
scraped from the Canadian Job Bank and Numbeo globally
crowd-sourced repository to explore the relationship between
job postings during a global pandemic and Key Performance
Indicators (e.g. quality of life index, cost of living) for major
cities across Canada. This analysis aims to help Canadians make
informed career decisions, collect a “snapshot” of the Canadian
employment opportunities amid a pandemic, and inform job
seekers in identifying the correct fit between the desired lifestyle
of a city and their career. We collected a new high-quality
dataset of job postings from jobbank.gc.ca obtained with the
use of ethical web scraping and performed exploratory data
analysis on this dataset to identify job opportunity trends. When
optimizing for average salary of job openings with quality of life,
affordability, cost of living, and traffic indices, it was found that
Edmonton, AB consistently scores higher than the mean, and is
therefore an attractive place to move. Furthermore, we identified
optimal provinces to relocate to with respect to individual skill
levels. It was determined that Ajax, Marathon, and Chapleau,
ON are each attractive cities for IT professionals, construction
workers, and healthcare workers respectively when maximizing
average salary. Finally, we publicly release our scraped dataset as
a mid-pandemic snapshot of Canadian employment opportunities
and present a public web application that provides an interactive
visual interface that summarizes our findings for the general
public and the broader research community.