Alberta has more than twice the number of apprentices in training than it had a decade ago thanks in part to help from industry.
Apprenticeship Training Programs
Correspondent
Alberta has more than twice the number of apprentices in training than it had a decade ago thanks in part to help from industry.
No province has formed closer ties to industry than Alberta and that, some say, makes it Canada’s training champion. With a record 53,000 apprentices registered, Alberta, with less than 10 per cent of the country’s population, boasts about 20 per cent of the total apprentices in Canada.
Shell Canada is the latest to come on board with a $3 million investment, the largest community contribution in the company’s history, to NAIT’s Building on Demand campaign.
With retirement looming for Canada’s aging skilled workers “we are facing a significant skills shortage,” says Brian Straub, Shell Canada’s senior vice president oil sands. “Shell Canada’s ongoing growth depends on the availability of skilled workers who can deliver world class technical projects. NAIT targets the manufacturing, trades and technical skills Shell Canada needs for its current and future operations.”
Shell Canada’s contribution will see $2.5 million go to the $12.5 million NAIT Shell Manufacturing Centre, which will open next March, and $500,000 for trades bursaries and scholarships for students pursuing apprenticeship and technical training.
Shell is the majority owner of the Athabasca Oil Sands Project, an expansion of its Muskeg River mine in Fort McMurray and Scotford Upgrader in Fort Saskatchewan. More than 10,000 construction workers will be employed on the project at its peak in 2008.
The majority will be skilled trades people including welders, pipefitters, electricians, boilermakers, cement masons, millwrights, ironworkers, instrumentation technicians and carpenters and that’s why the company invested $3 million in the NAIT campaign, Shell officals say.
NAIT has now raised $33 million of its $50 million Building on Demand goal toward a $750 million campus expansion that will increase the school’s training capacity by nearly 50 per cent, from 65,000 to 95,000 registrants a year. Like SAIT in Calgary, NAIT is turning away apprentices because of a lack of classroom time.
NAIT’s creative efforts to expand its services to students include Trades in Motion, a mobile classroom program that delivers 24 weeks of intensive pre trades training directly to residents of remote communities. It also signed an agreement with the Northwest Territories to set up a campus in Yellowknife.
Another NAIT-industry partnership recently received a boost. Finning (Canada) has significantly increased scholarships to students enrolled in the ThinkBIG Caterpillar Dealer Service Technician Program at NAIT. Students can now receive up to $26,000, an increase from $10,000, to offset tuition costs for the two-year program.
Finning’s donation will create the largest scholarship in NAIT’s history. It was made, said Andy Fraser, Finning (Canada) group vice president, because “the challenge in Alberta’s hot economy, where we are seeing unprecedented demand for labour and extraordinarily high wage rates, is to ensure that incentives are in place to attract students into post secondary training and that they are sufficient to encourage them to remain there to complete their studies.”
The ThinkBIG program, accredited as part of the Alberta apprenticeship system, is located on NAIT’s Fairview Campus and provides students with all of the in-class training required to meet the Alberta Apprenticeship Board requirements for the Heavy Equipment Technician trade.
Launched in the fall of 2003, the program had 160 qualified applicants that year for 24 spaces.
NAIT accepts 24 students a year and upon completion of the two-year program students have the opportunity to challenge the Heavy Equipment Technician Alberta apprenticeship examinations with Finning paying the costs associated. Besides the scholarships, Finning provides each student with a $9,000 set of tools to use during the course which are theirs to keep free if they have an overall average of 80 per cent or higher and work for Finning for one year.>
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