500 City Jobs to Be Filled in Fort McMurray, Alberta !!!!!!

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500 City Jobs to Be Filled in Fort McMurray!!!!!!
From Fort McMurray Today


Applications for municipal positions surge as oilsands economy weakens
Posted 2 days ago
  

By ASHLEY CREWE

Today staff


Industry layoffs mean an influx of much-needed applications to the Regional Municipality’s job board, looking to close the gap on some 300 job vacancies and an additional 200 newly approved jobs.

Leslie Robertson, acting general manager for human resources at the municipality, said now is the time to play “catch-up.”

“Our vacancy rate has been growing so fast over the last 10 years — trying to fill our jobs, we just couldn’t keep up,” said Robertson. “So we’re trying to close that gap on our vacancy rate to make sure we’ve got our people in positions and make sure our services are provided.”

Robertson said there are close to 500 positions the municipality is hoping to fill this year, including 223 new positions recently approved by council.

“The mayor had originally gone and asked for a slowdown on the oilsands projects and that was denied and now we’ve got one, so now we’re taking every advantage,” said Robertson.

Dennis Peck, general manager of planning and development, announced 17 new jobs in his department last week and is planning to recruit new graduates.

“I am looking for bright young planners to work in this community,” said Peck on Thursday night at the Big Spirit Projects 2009 presentation, a partnership with environmental design students from the University of Calgary.

“We’ll be visiting Waterloo University, Ryerson and possibly the University of Toronto,” said Robertson. “We’ll be going out east as well, possibly to Quebec and Nova Scotia … there’s not a lot of recognition over there about the Municipality of Wood Buffalo, but there is a lot of media recognition of Fort McMurray that makes us seem less desirable, but for planners, they’d love to get involved in some of these projects.”

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Robertson said there’s a lot of work to do, including building more housing, developing commercial land, industry and other infrastructure. Every department is in a hiring frenzy. Robertson said there are plenty of administrative positions, particularly police clerks for the RCMP, who recently moved into their new building in Timberlea.

“Because the sites have laid off a lot of contractors like administrative support, we’ve been getting a lot of resumés and we’re happy to get those … every department requires administration,” said Robertson.

There are also finance positions in accounts payable and accounts receivable, water treatment specialists, parks staff, IT, human resources advisors, engineers, millwrights, plumbers and summer students.

“There are almost 100 summer student positions,” said Robertson. “Most of those are in parks. We have them on our website right now and we took those over to Keyano as well,” said Robertson.

Even summer students who will earn $19.30 an hour will also receive the cost of living allowance of an additional $1,040 per month.

Along with planning a local recruiting event in March, municipal representatives will also be heading to various locations in Ontario next month as well as travelling to Newfoundland in the spring.

To accommodate the growing staff, the municipality is exploring various solutions. Robertson said the planning and development department will be moving into a new building that will be completed this April, which will open up a floor in the Jubilee Centre. The space left open by the former RCMP headquarters will also be filled along with the library area once it is relocated to MacDonald Island Park.

“We’re getting more creative … we’re exploring the idea of people working from home or from different offices,” said Robertson. “We have to think way beyond what a normal municipality might think about.”

Robertson said that includes offering temporary housing for newly recruited staff to relieve some of the pressure of starting a new job and finding a place to live all at once. The municipality is also planning to build another municipal office building within the next few years.

“Our aim is to get to (a population of) 250,000,(Currently only 90,000) so we have to plan and act towards that,” she said. “It might be a little slower in the next one or possibly two years, but we’re thinking way beyond that. We’re hoping the community won’t be caught short again.”