Demand for skilled trades is soaring. So what's standing in the way of more apprenticeships?
Story by Jessica Wong • CBC
Though he once considered dropping out of school, Grade 12 student Nathan Godet says he's now showing up early thanks to an engaging course that marks the first time he's ever enjoyed going to class.
The 17-year-old says his construction industry co-op course has reinforced his interest in the heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) industry — which he'd already been familiar with through family — and helped pinpoint a specialty to pursue: gas technician work.
"I don't believe I would have been in school right now without this program," said Godet. "I'd probably be working minimum wage right now."
Classmate Khate Agne says the co-op course — where Toronto District School Board students learn at carefully selected construction sites — has helped broaden their horizons and offered the Grade 11 student a peek into different career paths.
"I could go to university, but slowly I've actually been starting to lean into … skilled trades," said the 17-year-old, who has a budding interest in carpentry and construction management.
Canadians nearing retirement outnumber young people entering the working world, and demand for a new generation of skilled trades workers is soaring. Amid record high job vacancies in sectors like construction and manufacturing, new registrations for apprenticeship programs have risen, according to Statistics Canada. But the programs took a major hit during the pandemic, and apprenticeships and trade certifications have yet to catch up to pre-COVID-19 levels.
Provinces have responded to this labour shortfall in a variety of ways.
B.C. is boosting apprenticeship and foundation training seats, while Alberta is investing in skilled trades training for women. Last week, Ontario unveiled a mandatory technological education credit for high school students and is allowing young people to begin apprenticeships full-time starting in Grade 11.
But there are still several problems that need to be tackled, according to educators in the trades.
Toronto teacher Elvy Moro says the Step to Construction co-op lets students determine in just a few weeks' time whether a particular trade fits. 'The power of that is phenomenal.'
Teacher shortage
Elvy Moro, one of the two teachers leading Godet and Agne's Step to Construction co-op class, has seen rising interest in the program over the past 17 years, as Canada's need for younger tradespeople has increased.
His students sample many jobs in just a few months — they might spend a couple of weeks on-site with carpenters, followed by time with construction craft workers, sheet metal experts, electricians, plumbers and so forth. He calls it a phenomenally engaging, hands-on experience that helps many students figure out what fits.
"Our philosophy is to expose them to as much as possible and then give them that opportunity to make those important decisions in life — and help them to make the right decision," Moro said.
But a key barrier standing in the way of these courses is a lack of educators, says Matthew Bradley, TDSB's co-ordinator for the Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program (OYAP), who popped into Moro's class last week.
The past decade has seen an overwhelming rise in demand for skilled tradespeople, as well as lucrative wages for the most coveted of them, but Bradley points out that this coincided with a doubling of the teacher-training period from one to two years for new Ontario educators. This is why he says it's become less attractive for an experienced journeyperson to switch to newbie teacher — not to mention the significant pay cut he says comes with that switch.
'We need parents, we need guidance counselors, we need teachers and students to all understand the value of the apprenticeship pathway,' says Matt Bradley, the Ontario Youth Apprenticeship Program co-ordinator for the Toronto District School Board.
"All across the province, there are widespread vacancies in shops like this because they don't have a qualified teacher," he explained, noting that better recognition of trades work experience for teachers in training and starting pay more comparable to what they made as skilled tradespeople would help more people to consider making the switch.
Raising the profile of the pathway to the skilled trades is also imperative, according to Bradley.
"Most people aren't aware about apprenticeship at all," he noted, calling it a common misconception among parents, students and the wider community that university and college are the only options after high school.
"From B.C. to Alberta, Ontario and the Maritimes, everyone is screaming for more skilled tradespeople," he said. "We need employers, we need parents, we need guidance counsellors, we need teachers and students to all understand the value of the apprenticeship pathway."
Framing skilled trades as 'sexy'
Mandy Rennehan saw opportunity in the construction trades 30 years ago as a teen in Yarmouth, N.S. At the time, no one encouraged her in that direction despite her early interest and aptitude. Still, she forged ahead.
"Nobody at the high schools, none of my people around me were telling me — especially being female — to go into the skilled trades, because that's not where [people] were going to be revered. That's not where they were going to be praised," the construction mogul and host of HGTV's Trading Up with Mandy Rennehan recalled, in an interview from Naples, Fla.
These days, the founder and CEO of retail construction and maintenance company Freshco channels her decades of experience and passion for the skilled trades into advocating for them and dispelling the stigmas that can surround them. Like, for instance, the ideas that trades careers are back-breaking menial work, provide little intellectual stimulation, or that they're simply not for women.
Rennehan describes tradespeople as polymaths that Canadians should value and be proud of and says what's really needed is for the trades to be shown "for the sexy, essential industry it is, full of opportunities."
Robotics, computer simulators, artificial intelligence, advanced tools and new technologies are transforming these careers in exciting ways that she says should command more respect and attention.
In turn, Rennehan says, the sectors themselves must double down on policies and workflows that make the trades a place where women and diverse communities feel they belong.
She believes the young apprentices of today will change the trades from within since they've learned more about racism, discrimination and the importance of tolerance, equality and inclusion than prior generations.
"More women and more young men who come into the trades [valuing equality] is really going to help the industry."
Rennehan wants to see workplaces improve policies and workflows to make the skilled trades somewhere women and diverse communities feel they belong. Young people joining today will change these industries from within, she says.
Ongoing learning, training 'super critical'
After running his own repair shop for nearly two decades, Mike Bocsik returned to Camosun College, his Victoria alma mater, where he's spent the past 12 years as an automotive instructor.
In his experience, today's students want to be fully engaged in what they're learning and are hungry for depth, detail and up-to-date industry developments. According to Bocsik, that means instructors have to be "on their game."
Regardless of how long tradespeople have been working, he points out that they need regular, ongoing training to keep up with technological advancements — which arrive nearly every quarter for the automotive industry.
"If you let things stagnate, you're going to [fall] behind," he said. "It's super critical to continue with the upgrading and just move forward."
Bocsik says his students "want to start doing something right now," which works out well, since he says employers in the industry are constantly approaching the college looking for new apprentices.
He believes the education sector and trades industries should collaborate to create more outlets and facilities for students to learn and get hands-on experience to get started in jobs quickly.
Some programs — like Camosun's automotive training that covers the rapidly expanding electric vehicle industry — currently have wait lists several years long.
Another initiative Bocsik would like to see happen soon is more opportunities for veteran journeypeople — including those nearing retirement — to pass on their decades of knowledge and guide younger colleagues toward full and satisfying careers.
While he says the best path for the sector going forward would be to focus on the idea of the trades a career as opposed to just a job, Bocsik also notes the current labour shortage means apprentices can get work quickly.
"If you want it, you're going to get it."
One Good Turn (book)
One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw is a book published in 2000 by Canadian architect, professor and writer Witold Rybczynski.[1]
The idea for the book came in 1999 when an editor at The New York Times Magazine asked Rybczynski to write a short essay on the best and most useful common tool of the previous 1000 years. Rybczynski took the assignment, but as he researched the history of the items in his workshop – hammers and saws, levels and planes – he found that most dated well back into antiquity. At the point of giving up, he asked his wife for ideas. She answered: "You always need a screwdriver for something."
Rybczynski discovered that the screwdriver is a relatively new addition to the toolbox, an invention of the Late Middle Ages in Europe and the only major mechanical device not independently invented by the Chinese. Leonardo da Vinci was there at the start, designing a number of screw-cutting machines with interchangeable gears. Nevertheless, it took generations for the screw (and with it, the screwdriver and lathe) to come into general use, and it was not until modern times that improvements such as slotted screws came into being. Rybczynski spends some time discussing the Canadian invention, the Robertson screwdriver.
External links[edit]
- "Presentation by Rybczynski on One Good Turn". 2000-09-13.
References[edit]
- ^ Rybczynski, Witold (2000), One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw, Scribner, ISBN 978-0-684-86729-8, LCCN 00036988, OCLC 462234518. Various republications (paperback, e-book, braille, etc).
One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw
by Witold Rybczynski
It started last year with a call from a New York Times editor with his eye on the millennium. Would Witold Rybczynski care to pen an essay celebrating the Best Tool of the last 1,000 years? If Rybczynski was at first a little reluctant – why couldn’t he essay Best Architect or Best City? – the former Montreal architect, who now teaches urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania, soon warmed to his subject. But which tool was Best? Sifting the contents of his box of hand tools, he considered the handsaw, the tape measure, the carpenter’s brace. Necessary all, but somehow none was quite momentous enough. Likewise the screwdriver, which got Rybczynski’s wife’s vote, but not his. At first.
The first books Rybczynski consulted told him that the screwdriver was one of the last additions to the woodworker’s arsenal. And yet the deeper he dug, the more evidence he discovered suggesting that this wasn’t so. Leading the way back all the way to Archimedes, “the Father of the Screw,” Rybczynski visits with Diderot and Dürer; offers a potted history of buttons; explores the rise of the arquebus; and tells the story of a mostly unheralded screwdriver hero, the Canadian inventor Peter Robertson.
One Good Turn looks a slender book, and it might seem all the more so lined up against the biography of Frederick Law Olmsted that foregoes it in the Rybczynski bibliography. Subtitled “America in the Nineteenth Century,” A Clearing in the Distance was Simon Schama-esque in its cultural scope, with Rybczynski using his subject as a lens through which to gaze on a nation in a crucial moment in its history.
If this book isn’t quite so ambitious, it’s an altogether charming slice of arcana, written with an elegance that won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Rybczynski’s earlier work – The Most Beautiful House in the World, say, or his inquiries into the ideas of home and the weekend. One Good Turn is a fascinating and delightfully dense mix of detective story, social study, historical anecdote, and industrial evolution that transcends the humble tool box.
A Short History Of Screws
Many familiar carpentry tools and materials have ancient roots. As author Witold Rybczynski points out in his engaging One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw (Touchstone Books, 2000), squares, plumb lines, chalk lines, levels, and toothed saws were all well-known to the builders of the Egyptian pyramids. Chisels, axes, hammers, and nails date back at least to the Bronze Age. The Romans invented the plane and forged-iron nails, and relied on nuts and bolts to assemble the portable wooden A-frames used for lifting heavy objects.
Somehow, though, the Romans never developed the screw. The first known examples seem to date from the 15th century, when armorers and gunsmiths used them to fasten the metal mechanical parts of early firearms to their wooden stocks. Because screws were made by hand and were not commonplace, screwdrivers (or "turnscrews," as they were called until well into the 19th century) were evidently not taken very seriously. In describing one of the earliest known screwdrivers - which appeared on an armorer's combination tool that also included a hammer, wire cutter, and nail puller - Rybczynski notes sadly that it "resembles the kind of gimcrack household gadget that is sold by Hammacher Schlemmer."
Widespread use of screws for carpentry didn't become practical until after 1760, when two English brothers, Job and William Wyatt, patented the first screw-making machinery. The Wyatts' factory was bad news for a class of workers called "girders," who had previously worked in their cottages laboriously hand-filing threads onto screw blanks hammered out by local blacksmiths. But it meant more and better work for finish carpenters - especially in combination with the mass-produced butt hinge, another innovation that appeared at about the same time. Unlike the earlier strap hinges, which were roughly fastened with clinched nails, the newer butt hinges called for skillful fitting and had to be screwed in place.
Further innovations followed. Machine-made screws had blunt ends until 1859, when a Providence, R.I., mechanic named Cullen Whipple patented a method of producing pointed screws. Decades later, Canadian inventor Peter L. Robertson and American Henry L. Phillips separately improved the screw's other end, replacing the traditional slot with a square socket - still known as the Robertson head - and the familiar cross-shaped recess of the Phillips head. In the 1950s, Illinois fire-protection engineer Paul Quigg and a team of co-workers at the U.S. Gypsum Corp. perfected the drywall screw.
While arguably a more efficient design than the cross-shaped Phillips head, the square-drive Robertson head screw - shown here in a 1907 patent application - is much less common today. That's probably because inventor Peter Robertson opted not to license the design to other screw manufacturers, as Henry Phillips did.Long story short, the screw has, over the past 600 years, made up for its late start. One is struck, when reading Rybczynski's book, by the painstakingly incremental nature of invention - even when the item being invented is as humble and seemingly simple as the common screw. It makes you wonder: What other obvious ideas for hardware are floating out there, as yet unconceived? Will future carpenters be joining pieces of lumber with some sort of fastener that's as far advanced beyond the screw as the screw is from the nail?
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