A new Canadian career navigation platform has launched as research reveals a gap between Canadians’ confidence in the country’s future AI workforce and their own ability to compete.
Toronto-based PathPilot provides personalized guidance on skills, job matching, resumes and interview preparation. Built within recruiting firm GuruLink, the platform also helps career professionals manage caseloads, track activity and measure outcomes.
“Career guidance in this country was already stretched thin, and the labour market is changing faster than the systems meant to support it,” said PathPilot founder Drew Lindsay. “We did not build this to replace career professionals. We built it so they can have greater impact on more people, and so the person searching at midnight has somewhere to go.”
PathPilot launched alongside an Angus Reid Group survey of 1,501 Canadians examining their readiness for an AI-shaped labour market.
The federal government’s AI for All strategy aims to create up to 90,000 AI-related jobs and work-placement opportunities for young Canadians by 2031.
While 64 per cent of respondents believe young Canadians will have the skills to qualify for those opportunities, only 44 per cent believe they personally have, or could develop, the skills required to compete for an AI-related job.
Confidence varies significantly by generation. Sixty-two per cent of Gen Z respondents believe they could develop the necessary skills, compared with 55 per cent of Millennials, 43 per cent of Gen X and 28 per cent of Baby Boomers.
The survey found that 76 per cent of Canadians face at least one barrier to building AI skills. Twenty-seven per cent do not believe the skills are relevant to their careers, 23 per cent cited fear or unease about AI and 21 per cent do not know which skills are worth learning.
Half of respondents said clearer information about which skills to develop would best prepare Canadians for the changing job market.
Most are also navigating career decisions without professional help. Fifty-five per cent primarily figure them out alone, while 15 per cent turn to AI tools such as ChatGPT. Just six per cent consult a career counsellor or coach.
“The infrastructure to guide people through this shift does not exist at the scale it needs to,” Lindsay said. “That is what we are building.”
PathPilot has engaged more than 2,000 users and over 100 career practitioners. Its partners include the Future Skills Centre, Magnet and the Canadian Career Development Foundation.
The platform is available in 84 languages to employers, institutions and workforce organizations across Canada.