Grim new reality confronts engineers

As he surveys the crowd before him, Nader Zarabi lets out a laugh. “Hundreds of engineers, as far as the eye can see,” he says of the group dominated by mostly middle-aged men toting black briefcases, forming a line that wraps twice around the interior of the convention centre’s main floor.

It’s not that the 44-year-old engineer finds it all that funny. Rather, it’s just that he’s having trouble digesting the scene before him.

“If you had told me a year ago I’d be waiting hours in line at a job fair, my resume in hand, I never would have believed it,” says the Iranian expat and longtime Calgarian who was laid off three months ago. “I have never been out of work in my life, let alone been worried about my career.”

Welcome to the sign of the times, Calgary style. Zarabi, along with what would become, over the course of the day, thousands of other recently laid-off white-collar professionals, found himself among the masses of the city’s brain trust, dropping off his resume to a group of recruiters from Snamprogetti Canada, an engineering division of Milan-based SpA, one of the world’s largest oil and gas contractors.

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