Prepping for hands-on future

More than 1,200 students from across Manitoba hammered nails, operated miniature machinery and even tried their hand at masonry at a hands-on career fair organizers called a pitch for the “AI-resilient” jobs of the future.

The Manitoba Construction Career Expo has been organized by the Winnipeg Construction Association for more than 15 years. As Canada’s career landscape has changed for youth, there’s been an increasing interest in logging out of the virtual world and finding a more tactile profession, said Darryl Harrison, the association’s director of stakeholder engagement and advocacy.

“There’s a lot of opportunities in construction, whether you pursue an apprenticeship or take another path toward the industry, but it generally leads to well-paying jobs and it leads to a career that we’re now calling AI-resilient,” Harrison said at the event at Red River Exhibition Place on Wednesday.

“There’s a lot of careers where it’s questionable what the impact of AI will be, and we will always need hands-on work sites to build the buildings that we need.”

That rings true for Kyle Lavallee, an industrial arts teacher at Lord Selkirk Regional Comprehensive Secondary School, one of 37 schools in attendance Wednesday. Lavallee said he has brought students to the career expo for a decade, and agreed as students’ lives are increasingly being brought online, more have expressed feeling fulfilled by working with their hands.

“I think that the way that the world is going right now, I think kids are finding a lot more drawn toward something in the trades, it’s a lot more hands-on,” he said.

“A lot of the kids that I teach, they don’t want to sit at a desk, they don’t want to park themselves in one spot all day and just work on a computer. They want to be able to get up and move around and do something where they’re actually creating, building something.”

There’s hope that interest — along with a large chunk of federal funding — will put a dent in tradesperson shortages across Canada. The federal government’s spring economic update released last week included a commitment to spend up to $6 billion over the next five years toward the goal of creating 80,000 to 100,000 new Red Seal-certified trades workers.

At Red River College Polytechnic in Winnipeg, more seats were added this year in many of their skilled trade classes, including electrical and carpentry programs in response to waitlists, said Scott Savoy, RRC Polytech’s chair of construction trades.

“We know that there’s a huge skilled trade shortage in Canada, so I think schools are promoting it more, the media is promoting it more, our provincial and federal governments are promoting it more — so students are becoming more aware through a variety of reasons,” he said.

Much like the careers it put a spotlight on, many of the booths at Wednesday’s event included hands-on demos, but maybe none as daunting as a Manitoba Hydro display, which strapped students into belts and spurs and let them try out climbing poles, necessary for power line technicians.

Khloe Schlag, a Grade 9 student at Collège Pierre-Elliott-Trudeau in Winnipeg, braved an unseasonably cold May day and made it to the top of the pole, ringing a bell drilled into the top.

“Now, when I’m watching when I go home (and) see these people climbing the pools, fixing the Hydro lines, I have such respect for them,” Khloe said after making it back to solid ground. “It was a workout, it was hard.”

She’s not sure what the future holds, but said a job in the trades is a possibility. “There’s so many cool job opportunities, and definitely coming here (helped), seeing how many different positions and different things you could do.”

malak.abas@freepress.mb.ca