Overview

Introduction

The Career Coach Canadian Careers API is a RESTful service providing economic and labor market data for all careers in the National Occupational Classification (NOC) 2016 catalogue. The API supports flexible queries, allowing access to both general (national) and region-specific career data. All endpoints follow a JSON:API-like format, with a top-level data object containing objects or arrays with type, id, and attributes.

Support: Please contact your Lightcast / Career Coach account manager for technical or customer support regarding API use.

Data Overview

The Canadian Careers API provides comprehensive data for 502 careers defined in NOC 2016.

There are two types of data available through this API:

• General Career Data: Metadata about a career collected at the national level.
• Region-Specific Career Data: Data that varies depending on the geographic region specified in your query.

Below is an exhaustive list of career attributes, with region-specific attributes noted accordingly.

Career Attributes

• age (regional) – A percentage breakdown of employment by age group. Sources include Lightcast’s occupation data and the 2011 National Household Survey workforce demographics datasets.
• annual-earnings (regional) – Earnings at the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th percentiles. Based on Survey of Employment, Payroll, and Earnings (SEPH) datasets.
• annual-openings (regional) – The number of annual job openings for the career in the region, including both growth and replacement needs. Replacement rates come from the Canadian Occupation Projection System (COPS).
• categories – A list of categories that the career belongs to.
• core-tasks – A list of core or essential tasks necessary to the career.
• description – The official NOC description of the career, provided as part of Canada’s occupation classification system.
• education-attainment-levels – The educational attainment percentage breakdown for a career (e.g. the percentage of people in the career who hold Bachelor’s Degrees vs. Associate Degrees). Educational attainment levels are provided by _O_NET*.
• employment (regional) – The number of jobs in the career for the past two years, the current year, and projections for the next seven years. Job counts include both employed and self-employed persons, without distinction between full-time and part-time work. Data is sourced from Canada’s Labour Force Survey (LFS) and Survey of Employment, Payroll, and Hours (SEPH) datasets.
• employment-current (regional) – The number of jobs in the current year, based on the same sources as above.
• hourly-earnings (regional) – Current hourly earnings by percentile, based on SEPH datasets.
• median-earnings (regional) – The median (50th percentile) annual earnings for the career in the region, from SEPH.
• national-lq (regional) – The concentration of jobs for the specified career in a region compared to its concentration nationally.
• noc-id – The National Occupation Classification ID for the career.
• pathways – A list of pathways that the career belongs to.
• percent-female (regional) – The percentage of workers in the career who are female. Sources include Lightcast’s occupation data and 2011 National Household Survey datasets.
• percent-male (regional) – The percentage of workers in the career who are male. Sources include Lightcast’s occupation data and 2011 National Household Survey datasets.
• singular-title – The singular (de-pluralized) version of the title property.
• title – The official NOC career title.
• title-slug – A slugified version of the singular title (e.g. chemical-technician).
• typical-ed-level – The most common education level for the career by percentage. Educational attainment levels are provided by _O_NET*.

Career Categories and Pathways

This API provides both career category and pathway collections. These are derived from O*NET Clusters and Pathways and have been adapted for the Canadian framework.

Each category or pathway has:

• An id
• A name
• A description
• A list of associated careers

Pathways can be considered sub-categories of categories. For example, all pathways that start with 1 are children of category 1.

Data Detail Notes

• The age, percent-male, and percent-female fields are not available at all geographic levels. For convenience, higher-level data may be copied down to lower geographies:

  • When requesting Census Subdivision (CSD) level data, the percentages reflect the parent Economic Region.
  • When requesting Census Division (CD) level data, the percentages reflect the parent provterr/Territory.

O*NET Information

This API includes information from O*NET OnLine by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA) used under the CC BY 4.0 license. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. Lightcast has modified some or all of this information, and USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.

Resource Structure

Each route in this API is prefixed by /careers/ca. The API provides access to the following collections:

• All Careers
• Single Career by NOC ID or Title Slug
• All Categories
• Single Category by ID
• All Pathways
• Single Pathway by ID
• Career Search

Careers Structure: /careers/ca/{level}/{geoId}

Available Geography Levels (level):

• provterr – Province or Territory
• cma – Census Metropolitan Area
• cd – Census Division
• csd – Census Subdivision

Example: /careers/ca/csd/3531030 → Census subdivision 3531030 (Perth East).

For a single career:

• /careers/ca/csd/3531030/00010 (by NOC ID), or
• /careers/ca/csd/3531030/title/legislator (by title slug).

Note: The fields query key is required on every careers route.

Category and Pathway Collections:

• /careers/ca/categories → all categories
• /careers/ca/categories/{categoryId} → single category
• /careers/ca/pathways → all pathways
• /careers/ca/pathways/{pathwayId} → single pathway

API Endpoint

There are multiple endpoints within this category. Refer to individual API docs under the Career Coach CA Careers section.

Request Headers

(*) Indicates the action to be required

All requests must include the following headers:

Authentication

All endpoints in this category require an OAuth 2.0 Bearer Token for authentication. Tokens are granted through Lightcast’s Authentication API and are valid for 1 hour.

To access the Career Coach CA Careers API, the token must include the following scope:

• careers:ca (for expanded access)

Sample Request

curl --request POST \
  --url https://auth.emsicloud.com/connect/token \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded' \
  --data 'client_id=<CLIENT_ID>' \
  --data 'client_secret=<CLIENT_SECRET>' \
  --data grant_type=client_credentials \
  --data scope=careers:ca

Request Parameters

Sample Response

{
  "access_token": "<ACCESS_TOKEN>",
  "expires_in": 3600,
  "token_type": "Bearer"
}

Note that the Tokens expire after 3600 seconds. To maintain uninterrupted access, refresh the token before it expires. To know more about this, refer to the Authentication guide.

Response Parameters

Status Code Summary

Versioning

The Career Coach Canadian Careers API is currently at version 1.0. New data updates, fields, and minor hotfixes may be added at any time and are not considered breaking changes.

Data is typically refreshed once per quarter, as new economic information becomes available. Clients will be notified when new data or features are released.

In the rare event that a version is deprecated, clients will receive at least 90 days’ notice to update their queries to the new format.