Page 34 - InvestAlberta-EDA-2025

FEATURE
PROVINCE
FOR HIRE
Alberta’s dynamic workforce
is ready for the future
BY TOM NDEKEZI
A lberta is Canada’s fastest growing province,
drawing a young, diverse workforce that
is shaping the future of the province’s economy.
Alberta has added almost 1 million residents over
the last decade — thanks to both international
immigration and interprovincial migration, the
population hit 4.8 million in 2024. With 41,531
in net interprovincial migration in the second
quarter of 2024 alone, the workforce is growing
and diversifying.
“There’s this greater notion in developed
economies that the middle class is going away and
that there’s this polarization of the labour market
towards the tails [of the earnings distribution],”
says Joseph Marchand, professor of economics
at the University of Alberta and director of the
Alberta Centre for Labour Market Research.
Marchand’s research focuses on the impacts of
forces like aging, minimum wages and boom and
bust cycles on labour demographics.
“So there’s really highly educated people
on one end and then all of the other tasks that
we can’t automate on the other end, but those
middle-manufacturing jobs are going away,”
Marchand says. “What’s interesting about Alberta
is that when we have an energy boom, those
[middle-manufacturing jobs] are actually the
tasks that are in most demand. And so it creates
this middle class that everybody’s looking for in
developed economies.”
And while that bell-curve-shaped earnings
distribution might be a lingering product of the oil
patch, it also benefits Alberta beyond the resource
economy. While developments like artificial
intelligence might spell the end for professions
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