The credential floor has moved
A Coursera certificate is table stakes. It gets you past the resume screen at maybe a third of Canadian employers. It does not get you hired.
What gets you interviewed
- A verifiable diploma from a Canadian institute that hiring managers can validate in one click.
- A public portfolio with at least two shipped projects (not tutorials) with commit history and a README that explains trade-offs.
- Fluency in the Canadian compliance vocabulary (PIPEDA, AIDA, OCAP). This is a filter question at every major bank.
What gets you hired
- The ability to explain a model failure without defensiveness.
- Prompt-engineering discipline: you can produce a reproducible eval set for any use case.
- A working understanding of cost. Everyone can call an LLM; few can call it profitably.
Where the roles are
Banking (Toronto), government (Ottawa), applied research (Montréal), energy (Calgary), climate/health (Vancouver). Every province is hiring — availability differs by seniority.