$10-M gift a boost to RRC Polytech

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This article was published 29/06/2023 (886 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

With the help of a $10 million gift from Gerry Price and the Price Family Foundation, RRC Polytech will develop an initiative to expose students to the newest technology that’s transforming the manufacturing industry.

The largest donation in the college’s more than 90-year history was announced at a festive event at RRC Polytech on Wednesday, complete with confetti cannons, creating the Price Institute of Advanced Manufacturing and Mechatronics.

(Mechatronics is variously defined as the integration of all the engineering disciplines and the intersection of mechanics, electronics and computing. It generally refers to the integration of digitization and manufacturing.)

With close to 8,000 manufacturing positions that will need to be filled over the next five years, the initiative is targeted at closing the skills gap that currently exists in the $6 billion provincial manufacturing sector that currently employs close to 70,000 people.

Gerry Price, the CEO of Price Industries — which has grown from five engineers and engineering technologists in the late 1970s to 400 people today — said the skills needed to run an internationally competitive manufacturing business have changed dramatically over the past 20 years.

“It is challenging as a manufacturer to stay current. It is almost impossible because it is evolving so quickly. It is so technical. It requires the skills and teaching that RRC can deliver,” he said.

The new initiative, scheduled to launch in the fall of 2023, will create two new post-graduate diploma programs, fund a growing inventory of micro-credential programs that will have the resources and instructors to up-skill and re-skill up to 1,000 employees each year and fund Manitoba’s first Applied Research Chair in Advanced Manufacturing.

The new funding will also go towards developing a space for small- and medium-sized manufacturers to be able to engage RRC students who will do their own research to help solve specific technology challenges for those companies.

Fred Meier, the president of RRC, said it will increase by 150 per cent the number of engineering technology graduates the college produces every year.

Meier remembered a conversation he had early on with Price about the initiative.

“Gerry told me that what’s required is adding to the quantity and quality of graduates, including the new skill that will be needed in the future,” Meier said.

“We know the adoption of advanced manufacturing in Manitoba faces challenges. At the top of the list of challenges is filling the gap in the skills and talent of our existing workforce needed to adapt to this new technology.”

While the initiative does not mean the creation of a new curriculum, per se, industry officials say it is a welcome acknowledgment of the significant transformation that is taking place in one of the most important sectors in the provincial economy.

Ron Koslowsky, the head of the Manitoba chapter of Canadian Manufactures and Exporters Manitoba, said this is an example of an educational institution implementing what the manufacturers have been saying they need.

“It’s not just the technology, which is great, but it’s the applied research piece as well, also the flexibility. We have been talking about the way education is delivered, not just what you deliver. RRC is willing to try to different modularized approaches,” he said.

Christine Watson, RRC’s vice-president academic, referred to the new Price Institute of Advanced Manufacturing and Mechatronics as a “matrixed-organization.”

“It is an intentional collaboration. We will be pulling from so many disciplines. That includes data security, industrial networking, people who can pull the data from the networks, product design, user experience, all the way to cybersecurity and the actual creation of the products and distribution to supply chains.”

The donation from Gerry and Barb Price to RRC is not the first significant contribution to the engineering education infrastructure in the province by the Price Family Foundation. In 2020, they donated $20 million to the University of Manitoba, which has renamed its engineering school the Price Faculty of Engineering.

Price explained that contributions are not about investing in support for his own company.

“We are going to be fine as a company without any of this. Our company is on a pace that is self-driven. It’s not an issue for us. We are doing this for the community, period. For this community to be successful in the long run we need volumes of highly skilled, high-performing engineers and technologists,” he said.

Industry officials have long worried about the need to find the right kind of skilled workers to keep abreast of changing technology that digitization and now artificial intelligence have ramped up to warp speed.

The donation to RRC Polytech will mean students won’t be taught things that are outdated by the time they graduate, Price said.

“Students themselves deserve to have the opportunity to be experts in what is relevant today, not experts at what was relevant 15 years ago,” he said.

Meier also announced the Price Family Foundation renewed its scholarship funding for another five years, bringing their total scholarship funding to just less than $11 million.

Price spoke about the challenges students can have trying to hold down jobs while pursuing post-secondary education.

“We are glad to be able to lessen the financial burden on some students to give them more time to focus on studies so they can rise to their highest possible level,” he said.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.ca