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The reaction was that Edmonton's southern "partner" in the oil industry -Calgary -began to attract the head offices of various oil companies, and consequently outside business interests, including American ones.

In the new global economy, however, Edmonton is developing a reputation as the centre of other industries -industries that cannot necessarily be physically located within the downtown core.

David Whitson, a political science professor at the University of Alberta, notes that Edmonton has started to become a high-tech hub, including the pharmaceuticals industry.

the rise in structural unemployment by cause in the latter paper. The authors find that skills mismatch is causing very little of the increase. Rather, unemployment insurance is responsible for most of it, with productivity improvements making up the rest.

The Mentoring Partnership Program is run by the Toronto Region Immigrant Employment Council (TRIEC) through 12 agencies and 27 corporate partners. Since its creation six years ago, it's arranged 5,300 matches, with the help of more than 3,800 volunteer mentors.

"Of all our programs, it's probably the initiative that's caught the imagination of our corporate partners. It has a real return for them," says TRIEC executive director Elizabeth McIsaac. "It can be a form of soft recruitment and it helps its leaders become more cross-culturally competent."

it's in unlicensed professions where networking is crucial that the mentoring program makes the biggest difference.

10,000 new construction jobs, 600 engineering jobs and hundreds of new operating positions.

Labour costs can’t be avoided Why are local labour markets key to containing inflation? When demand picks up in Alberta, imported goods can simply be ramped up as well. The cost of a Toyota didn’t change significantly in ’08, for instance. Conversely, the cost of a haircut, building a high-rise or an up-grader all increased substantially. High labour costs for non-tradable goods and services simply can’t be avoided.

We’re not yet at the point where the Alberta labour market is strained because  natural gas is still down and governments have cut back so the added activity can likely be accommodated without causing wages to spike. Unfortunately, that can change quickly. Thankfully, while confederacy doesn’t always lead to an optimal interest rate for western Canada, it does provide a pressure release valve through inter-provincial migration.

People relocate for a variety of reasons (family, education, etc.), but, typically, there are three main economic drivers: wages, cost of living and the unemployment rate, which are all linked to one another. For instance, what’s the point of having a higher average wage if it is entirely eaten up by higher living expenses, and wages might be higher in another province, but if they’re not hiring there’s not much point relocating.

A hopeful hiring climate is expected for Edmonton in the spring, but employers aren't as optimistic as they were to start the year.

The latest Manpower Employment Outlook Survey, released Tuesday, found that 21 per cent of Edmontonarea employers plan to hire for the upcoming quarter (April to June), while nine per cent expect cutbacks, for a net outlook of 12 per cent

Sixty-nine per cent of employers will maintain their current staffing levels and one per cent were unsure of their hiring intentions.

Measurement of capacity building frequently involves the use of a logic model and self-assessments, which can be useful in helping to focus evaluation and in gathering individual perceptions.  Two drawbacks to the use of the logic model for evaluation are firstly that funder output focus may not match actual organizational goals and outcomes, and secondly that the complex relationships between components in the system are over-simplified or ignored. Self-assessments alone are problematic in that they focus solely on the perception of individuals and lack objectivity because they may be influenced by: effort, bias, discrimination, interpersonal conflict in the organization, desire to avoid scrutiny, fear of reprisal or personal gain.

To streamline the complex analysis governments need to undertake, MGI offers a new framework of six sector groups that share characteristics and respond to similar approaches to enhancing competitiveness. They are (1) infrastructure services; (2) local services; (3) business services; (4) research and development (R&D)-intensive manufacturing; (5) manufacturing; and (6) resource-intensive industries. In each of these groups, MGI documents how competitiveness levers vary and how policy has influenced competitiveness in each. These six categories provide a useful framework for understanding what determines competitiveness in different kinds of industries and what tangible actions governments and businesses can take to improve competitiveness

Policy makers pinning their hopes on cutting-edge “clean” technologies to create jobs on a large scale are likely to be disappointed. Innovation in R&D-intensive sectors can play a vital role, enabling productivity gains and consumer benefits in the economy more broadly—think IT. But such sectors alone are simply too small to make an economy-wide difference in growth and employment.

In the past, it has too often been hit or miss because it was based solely on a macroeconomic view—whether one country is more competitive than another.

The quest for new jobs, for example, is much more likely to bear fruit in large local-business and household-services sectors, where regulation can have the most direct impact.

The US economy did not have a conspicuous unemployment problem until the crisis of 2008 because the non-tradable sector absorbed the bulk of the expanding labor force. That pace of employment growth now appears unsustainable. Government and health care alone accounted for almost 40% of the net increment in employment in the entire economy from 1990 to 2008. Fiscal weakness, a resetting of real-estate values, and lower consumption all point to the potential for long-term structural unemployment.

Restoring elements of manufacturing competitiveness is hard. Once skilled labor, training programs, and technical institutions in specific industries are gone, it is difficult to get them back. Long-term policy should include an evolving assessment of competitive strength and employment potential across sectors and at all levels of human capital, with the goal of encouraging market outcomes that achieve social objectives.

Employment in Alberta increased for the second consecutive month, up 14,000 in February. As a result, the unemployment rate edged down by 0.2 percentage points to 5.7%.

In a sign that labour shortages have returned to Alberta, a major industrial employer launched a hiring campaign Tuesday to attract 9,000 workers in 2011.

Ledcor Industries Inc. has already hired 3,800 workers so far this year.

“Whenever there are quotes about the size of projects, it’s often 50 per cent labour and 50 per cent material,” Walker said.