Oil booms have meant good jobs in Alberta. But what does the future hold?

Business at the Vulcan Country Inn is slow just after noon on a weekday.

It's so slow, bartender Brenda Spencer is now the only employee in the lounge. If sales go up, she could slip into a manager role. But for now, she's pouring drinks and sometimes waits for hours before seeing a customer. 

"Like, it's a beautiful day. But no one's walking in, dropping in," she said, nodding at the room of a dozen empty tables and several VLTs.

This is Alberta — a province facing such an intense labour shortage that it's advertising for workers in Toronto and Halifax. But it's also a place with the highest unemployment rates in the country among major cities.

For Spencer, in this town 120 kilometres southeast of Calgary, the explanation for the quiet bar is obvious. Vulcan County, long known for its agricultural base, still heavily relies on the oil and gas sector. It's an industry that, over the last 50 years, has made up more than half of the county's tax base.

So Spencer is waiting — for the new oil boom to pad wallets and translate into customers, which in turn would lead to hiring.

For years, economists in industrialized countries have tracked what has been called a "hollowing out" of middle-skilled jobs — referring to jobs like machine operators and secretaries that economists place in the middle of wage distributions. 

If a person can't get a job that pays reasonably well in the middle, they often have to retrain or look at jobs requiring less skill with lower wages.

Until now, Alberta largely bucked this trend.

Joseph Marchand, a University of Alberta economist, studied how past oil and gas booms led to spillovers of employment in other industries and created more of these solid, middle-wage jobs.

In his research, Marchand tracked how job creation in the energy sector during boom times in the past spun off new work in sectors only loosely tied to energy — around three construction jobs, two retail jobs and 4½ service jobs for every 10 energy jobs, according to his research.

It's not clear yet if this current boom will do the same.

But Marchand says Alberta should cast an eye to the future when thinking about how to keep the middle class strong.

"The question going forward is, can we … target other things that could take the place of what an energy boom used to do for our economy?" he said.