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Despite the loss of nearly 30,000 energy sector jobs since the downturn, University of Calgary student Andy Wu was optimistic he’d find work after graduating in the spring of 2018.

But after a long summer of sending applications, driving around Alberta and even flying out of province for interviews, the young petroleum engineering graduate received only a few unattractive job offers and remained unemployed.

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“A lot of us graduates had expected we’d be employed right away,” said Wu, adding that some of his classmates took anywhere between six months to a year before finding work in or out of the province.

But for Wu, the end of his job hunt that summer took a different turn as he became one of the first students to enrol in the U of C’s new Master of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering program. The condensed, one-year program with a focus on software development is designed to give engineers additional skills to make them more employable in an increasingly digital world.