Education/training
Alberta rounding up Seneca gradsLast year a teenager working the night shift flipping burgers in a Red Deer fast-food joint told a visitor from Toronto he was making $18 an hour. |
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 [ 2008-02-13 ] |
Well, maybe. But there can be little doubt that prospects in Alberta are as good as or better than any in the country. In fact, the province is so desperate for skilled labour it is scooping up students and offering them jobs even before they have graduated.
That was the case with John Simpson and Emilia Borisenko, both 2007 graduates of the Real Property Administration program at Seneca College.
Simpson, who appraises and assesses 12,000 houses and the 30 golf courses, putting greens and driving ranges in Calgary, says the city came to Seneca in December 2006 to recruit staff with the proviso they had to have a degree.
That was no problem for Simpson, who graduated from Dalhousie University in Halifax in 1999 and who also taught English in Taiwan for more than five years.
Simpson's reasons for heading west aren't difficult to understand. There was the solid job offer, of course, but there was also the fact that there was more competition for jobs in his field in Toronto, thus making career advancement difficult. Calgary also offered "great progressive technology," says Simpson, who spent a year working for IBM in Dublin, Ireland.
JOB OFFERS
For Borisenko, a Russian and a native of Novosibirsk in Siberia, there were job offers from Edmonton and Vancouver, but she opted for Calgary instead because she considered the city a good place to start her career. In Calgary she handles 400 accounts both retail and industrial, including small plazas and gas bars.
During an interview, Borisenko, who's been in Canada five years, joked that Calgary's weather reminded her of home -- that day it was 40 degrees below -- but she's super-serious about the effort that was required from her to graduate from Seneca.
"I sacrificed everything for eight months," she says.
Both Simpson and Borisenko took Seneca's accelerated program in Real Property Administration, grinding their way to graduation in eight months.
And it was a grind. Simpson readily admits the program was a challenge despite his degree in sociology and says one of the toughest courses he took was statistical modelling. Other courses in the program include appraisal theory, real estate law and "a lot of financial math," he says.
For Borisenko, who has a degree in computer science and worked as a programmer for eight years back home, there was the added burden of studying in English. "It was hard; it wasn't easy for me. But my English skills went up substantially."
RECRUITING
Paul Sloggett, Seneca's Real Property Administration co-ordinator, says his students are being recruited by companies all through western Canada, with representatives from Calgary slated to come back to talk to this year's graduating class and Edmonton representatives visiting this week.
However, Sloggett says not all of his students will be qualified to accept interviews with both cities since Calgary requires its hires to have a degree as well as the Real Property Administration certificate. Edmonton asks for only a diploma and the certificate.
The program at Seneca, taught in partnership with the University of British Columbia, is unique, Sloggett explains. Its graduates are welcome in every province without additional training, he says, and this May, Seneca faculty hired by Alberta is going to the province to teach the program's curriculum.
More teaching may mean more graduates, Sloggett says, but Seneca is careful not to saturate the market. The college turns out just 25 to 30 graduates a year. After all, there are limits even to what Alberta can absorb.
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