LinkedIn Skills on the Rise 2026: The fastest-growing Information Technology skills in Canada

Our annual list of Skills on the Rise in Information Technology highlights the five fastest-growing skills that IT workers should be investing in to get ahead in today’s world of work. 

As the technology landscape rapidly evolves, so do the skillsets needed for success in IT roles. Prompt Engineering takes the top spot, signaling how professionals are using AI to streamline workflows and assist with routine tasks. Meanwhile, Governance, Risk and Compliance Management (No. 2) and Cloud Services & Infrastructure (No. 3) highlight the role IT teams play in equipping companies with the right infrastructure and processes to operate efficiently and compliantly. The ranking uses the same methodology as our Canada Skills on the Rise list, but reflects members within the specific job function versus the entire country. 

And these insights are just the beginning. You can read more about each skill and start honing your expertise through a related LinkedIn Learning course (free for all members until March 23). 

Check out the 5 fastest-growing skills in IT — and join the conversation using #SkillsOnTheRise. 

You can read our full methodology at the bottom of this article. This list is based on LinkedIn data and was produced by LinkedIn data scientist Yao Huang in partnership with editors on the LinkedIn News team (Juliette (Faraut) Bell, Sarah McGrath, Emily Bruck and Juliette Schiff). You can also see the Skills on the Rise in Business Development, Engineering, Finance and Sales.

What it means: Prompt engineering is the process of crafting and optimizing prompts for LLMs or other AI systems to get accurate and relevant outputs. Effective prompting can enable advanced workflow automation, code generation and security operations. 

💡 Learn how to craft high-impact prompts for generative AI tools (free LinkedIn Learning course until March 23)

What it means: Governance, risk management and compliance (GRC) is a framework used to ensure that a company’s technology systems are managed safely, meet regulatory requirements and align with business goals — involving setting policies, identifying and responding to threats and adhering to compliance.  

💡 Learn the fundamentals of governance, risk and compliance (free until March 23)

What it means: Cloud services and infrastructure refer to the physical infrastructure, like hardware and virtualization software, that supports cloud computing services — and the services that run on this infrastructure like SaaS applications or computing resources. 

💡 Learn how to build a secure enterprise infrastructure (free until March 23)

What it means: CI/CD is a set of practices that automate code integration and deployment into environments for testing, helping teams build, test and release software more efficiently. 

💡 Learn how AI automation can transform your software development workflow (free until March 23)

What it means: Team collaboration means working effectively with others to coordinate efforts — like troubleshooting, bug identification and system updates — and leverage collective strengths in order to achieve shared business goals.

💡 Learn how to foster effective collaboration (free until March 23)

List Methodology

LinkedIn measures the year-over-year growth of skills based on two pillars: skill acquisition and hiring success. Skill acquisition measures the growth of a given skill being added to member profiles. Hiring success measures the growth of a given skill possessed by members who have been hired in the past year. Growth rates for all metrics are measured by comparing LinkedIn data from December 1, 2024 to November 30, 2025 to the same period in the previous year (December 1, 2023 to November 30, 2024). To be ranked, skills must have had sufficient representation and activity volume over the analysis period.

Data is normalized across all skills. Language skills, basic digital literacy skills and overly broad skills are excluded.