Find out what people want before a company builds it. Surveys, data and clear reports.
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What you earn and what it costs to get there.
Typical
$92,000
Junior analyst
$57,000
Research director
$144,000
Job Bank's national median is $44 an hour, about $92,000 a year full time. Job Bank pools market researchers with business development officers, so the median may run a little high for pure research jobs. Junior roles at research firms often start near the low end.
$50,000 to $60,000
Research associate or junior analyst
Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver have most of the research firms. Government statistical jobs start a little higher and come with a pension.
$120,000 to $144,000
Research director or head of insights
The highest pay is in-house at banks, telecoms and consumer goods companies, or as a vice-president at a large research firm.
Tuition, fees, exams and kit. Not rent, food or travel
The low end is moving across from a job beside it, such as a marketing assistant, a survey or call centre role, or sales support, and teaching yourself spreadsheets, databases and survey tools. The free analytics certificates from the big technology companies cost nothing. The high end is a four year university degree plus a one year college certificate in research analysis, the combination most job advertisements ask for. The cheap door is harder because there is no credential to show, so you need an existing job to move from and a folder of real studies you have already run.
Typical debt is similar to any business or social science degree. Co-op programs let you graduate with experience and less debt.
Health and dental
Standard at research firms and corporate employers.
Pension
Defined-benefit pensions in government research and statistics jobs.
Hybrid work
Most analysis happens on a laptop. Fieldwork and client meetings are the exception.
Bonuses
Common at corporate insights teams, usually a percentage of salary.
The exact path from high school to qualified.
A degree with statistics in it, then a junior research job.
High school
Grades 11 and 12
Math through Grade 12, plus English. Data management courses are a bonus.
Bachelor's degree
4 years
Marketing, business, economics, psychology, sociology or statistics. Take every research methods and statistics course you can.
Graduate certificate, optional
1 year
Ontario colleges such as Georgian, Humber and Seneca run 1-year research analyst programs with a work placement. A fast route in for graduates of unrelated degrees.
Junior analyst
1 to 3 years
Writing survey questions, cleaning data, building charts and slides for senior staff.
Analyst and senior analyst
By year 5
Running your own studies from design to presentation.
Data management and statistics
The core of the job.
English
Findings are useless if nobody understands the report.
Business and marketing
You research to answer business questions.
Psychology or social science
Why people say one thing and do another.
No licence is required. The Canadian Marketing Association offers a chartered marketer program, and Canada's insights industry association offers a voluntary designation for research professionals, but employers hire on your degree, your statistics skills and your portfolio of projects. Privacy law does apply to your work: surveys and data must follow federal and provincial privacy rules.
Things you don't need, but that help.
Statistics and coding
R, Python or SQL (structured query language, for databases). Analysts who can model data outearn those who only run surveys.
Qualitative research
Running focus groups and interviews. A separate skill that senior researchers combine with the numbers.
Data visualization
Tableau or Power BI (Microsoft's business intelligence tool). Turning data into a story executives act on.
A master's degree
In marketing analytics, statistics or economics. Opens senior and government roles.
Co-op or internship at a research firm
The industry hires heavily from its own interns.
Student projects with real data
A survey you designed, analyzed and presented is a portfolio piece.
French
National studies always include Quebec.
Political and public opinion polling is a small, high-profile corner of market research. Firms like those you see quoted in election coverage hire the same skills: sampling, survey design and statistics. The hours are intense during campaigns and the results are public, which is either thrilling or terrifying.
Day to day, pros and cons, where you'd work.
Morning checking the response count on a survey in the field and fixing a question that is confusing people. A client call to agree on what a new study needs to answer. Hours in a spreadsheet or statistics software cleaning data and running cross-tabs. Afternoon building slides that turn numbers into three clear points. Some days include moderating a focus group behind a one-way mirror or sitting in on customer interviews.
The good
The hard parts
Things people don't tell you.
The federal statistics agency runs the census and hundreds of surveys a year, and hires analysts with exactly the skills market research uses. Its data is free and many private studies start with it.
A well-designed national survey of about 1,000 people gives a margin of error of roughly 3 percentage points. The math of sampling, not the size of the country, sets that number.
Serious Canadian research runs in both English and French, and results in Quebec often differ from the rest of the country on the same question. Bilingual analysts are in demand for that reason.
Last checked September 2026. Pay figures are typical full-time annual amounts in Canadian dollars, based on Government of Canada Job Bank wage data and published salary grids. They vary by province, employer and experience. Tuition is for domestic students.