Colleges keeping pace with industry.

• Author: Stewart, Nick
• Position: SPECIAL REPORT: SKILLED TRADES

Many Northern Ontario colleges are feeling increasing pressure from industry and government alike, who are looking more and more to them to produce greater numbers of graduates in the fields of skilled trades.

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As an example of the growing severity of the problem, the Mining Industry Training and Adjustment Council (Canada) projected in a 2006 report that 81,000 new workers will be needed within the mining industry in the next 10 years. This demand is compounded by the fact that 40 per cent of the sector's work force is slated to retire in that time.

General awareness of this need has grown so much that Sudbury's Cambrian College is seeing record numbers in skilled trades enrolment. For the 2006-2007 academic year, more than 1,000 students and apprentices are making use of the school's skilled trades programs.

"We're seeing about 200 to 300 more apprentices than usual," says Michel Barbeau, dean, School of Skills Training /Sky-Tech.

"Students are starting to really see the skill shortage, and they're understanding that there are immediate job opportunities."

In an attempt to cope with this rapidly growing need, Bar-beau says the school is pursuing the creation of an additional $130,000 machining lab. With 12 stations featuring lathes, mills and grinders and space for another four or five stations, the new lab will help to reduce significant training bottlenecks by allowing 50 to 80 more apprentices to be trained per year. However, even this will not fully cope with the backlog; in the millwright program alone, the waiting list features 80 people.

It's not just the mining industry that's finding itself short on labour. Companies from the trucking industry have also approached the college to develop a truck and coach technician program, which is still being developed and is tentatively slated for a September 2008 kick-off date.

As part of its own strategy for coping with the growing deficit within the field of skilled trades, College Boreal is pursuing a multi-phase project to expand its capacity to produce more graduates.

The first phase was completed in September with the construction of a new 70,000-square-foot Institute of Trades and Applied Technology, which will help the college to produce an additional 12,000 apprentices in the next five years. No timelines have been released on the...