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solid studies tend to suggest [retraining] is not the saving grace. It's not the best thing since sliced bread,” he says. Academic literature “tends to show little or no impact on a cost-benefit analysis.

best way to track the effectiveness of retraining is to compare one group that gets training with a similar group that doesn’t

Apprenticeships, co-op programs and close links with local employers tends to improve outcomes, he says.

targeted efforts inside our metro regions.

Colleges and community colleges, for example, presumably produce graduates who can think, analyze, read manuals. “But they’re turning out people who can’t do anything” — as simple, Walshok suggests, as working with spreadsheets, building a website or describing a complex piece of technology like an iPad application. So targeted post-graduate job training becomes critical.

demand for science and engineering jobs has been growing by about 5 percent a year, and the country has an estimated 2 million jobs unfilled because of lack of job skills

“Chicago Career Tech,” for example, is a new program launched by Mayor Richard M. Daley to take in middle-class workers adrift in the current recession and retrain them for technology careers

welders. Close to 100 percent of welding school graduates get snapped up by industries spread from aircraft manufacturing and ship building to erecting and repairing bridges — not to mention mass transit and railways along with green industrioes such as building wind energy turbines.

twice as many welders are retiring as being trained — the U.S. shortage may be as high as 200,000, in a field that pays solid wages.

he says, adding the federal government should instead be looking for ways to increase productivity, such as by helping companies invest in labour-saving equipmen

Instead of needing help to create jobs, Alberta firms are unique in that they need help finding labour, says Dale Allen, president of the Acheson Business Association and head of SciTech Engineered Chemicals.

"And that means it's now becoming difficult to get labour," says Allen, whose company of six employees produces environmentally friendly products such as organic salts for cleaning gas plants. "Everybody is competing for the same people."

To help the situation, Allen says the federal government should try to recruit skilled workers from countries like the United States and Great Britain, which are still going through economic difficulty. Bringing in unskilled, temporary foreign workers is a more time-consuming and costly practice for companies, he says.