The Alberta Jobs Plan is working according to Alberta's Minister of Economic Development and Trade and a couple of Calgary entrepreneurs.

They appeared at a news conference in Calgary Monday November 7 to talk about job numbers and investment.

Minister Deron Bilous says between May 1, 2016 and the end of July this year, 27,400 jobs were lost, but between August 1, 2016 and the end of October, 25,000 have come back.

"We're looking at the trend, which is a positive sign, but by no means am I saying we're out of the woods and it's time to celebrate," Bilous says. "We know that it's going to take a little time to get those unemployment numbers down."

The minister says the government's plan to diversify the economy will continue even if oil hit a $100 a barrel tomorrow.

The CEO of Payload, Sean Languedoc says there needs to be more people looking at entrepreneurship.

"It pains me to see these offices empty of "IT professionals"," he says. In Vancouver they're called developers, software developers, and they become entrepreneurs and the challenge Calgary has had has been, they come out of a computer science program and they go straight into a cubicle at some big oil company doing integrations with a large enterprise system and they don't get that entrepreneurial spirit."

He says what the media can do to help Calgary is to talk about places like the Assembly Coworking Space where a company can start with two people, as he did, and create an "eco-system where people feed off each other and with programs that provide money, get start ups going. Languedoc called it tragic that those people are looking in papers for jobs in other cities and not staying to work with entrepreneurs and build those companies.

Bilous says big projects like the Cancer Centre in Calgary and the southwest ring road will add thousands more jobs.