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Over the last year the London-St. Thomas region created 9,300 new jobs, a 3.8-per-cent cent increase in employment that dropped its jobless rate to 6.2 per cent — one of the best in big-city Canada — and swelled its workforce to 255,500, Statistics Canada reports.

Not only that, but London pulled even with and surpassed the national and Ontario jobless averages, completing a long climb back from unemployment that flirted with double-digit rates not long ago and which stood at 7.3 per cent just one year ago.

“It is a significant drop, a significant change,” Vincent Ferrao, a labour market analyst with Statistics Canada, said of London’s rebound.

But as a new year begins, amid a slowing national Canadian economy, observers say the challenge for London is to solidify those gains — to make sure that comeback stays concrete.