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Things that raise your pay

• Chip and FPGA (field-programmable gate array) design

  The scarcest hardware skill. AMD (a chip company) in Markham and Ciena in Ottawa hire for it.

• Embedded and real-time systems

  Cars, medical devices and aircraft all run on this. BlackBerry QNX (an operating system for cars) is built in Ottawa.

• Machine learning hardware and systems

  Making AI models run fast on chips. Very well paid right now.

• Cloud certifications

  Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, if you go the software route.