They’ve got mad ‘Skills’

Provincial competition promotes trades

Students from across Manitoba descended on Red River College’s Notre Dame and Princess Street campuses on April 10 to compete in the Skills Manitoba Competition, an event designed to showcase skilled trades and technologies.

According to Maria Pacella, director of Skills Manitoba, the competition is a cornerstone event for promoting vocational trades in the province.

“The Skills Manitoba Competition is our foundation,” said Pacella. “It’s sort of our signature event. We have 11 other programs that go on all year round, but what makes the competition unique is that there’s close to 500 students who participate from all over the province.”

The Skills Manitoba competition features over 40 different categories, from website development to plumbing to landscaping. Competitors in each category compete for bronze, silver, or gold medals, and are judged by industry professionals.

The gold medal winners move on to make up Team Manitoba at the national Skills Canada competition, held in Calgary this year, where they will compete against teams from across Canada. Calgary will also play host to the international skills competition in 2009, where teams from around the globe will compete to be crowned the best in the world.

“We just had a worlds competition in Japan. We had a student from Red River College compete in Japan in cabinet making just this past November,” said Pacella. “So that’s very exciting for us.”

Volunteers are essential to a competition such as Skills, Pacella says. They do everything from judge the competitions to arrange the logistics of the events.

Melinda Vandenberg, a member of the technical committee for the hairstyling competition, said that arranging her event is almost a year-long process.

“We have to arrange the scope, the judging, the criteria, we have to arrange all the media coverage for our event. We arrange for the prizes for all the students involved,” said Vandenberg. “We start in September,and meet about once a month to make sure everything gets done.”

Ken Plaetinck is co-chair of the TV/Video production competition. Plaetinck, a teacher at Tec Voc High School, believes these events are important to promote vocational jobs, which he says will soon be in dire need of workers.

“I think trade skills are extremely important right now because in the next few years our work force in that area is going to diminish, with the baby boomers all retiring,” said Plaetinck. “If we don’t start nurturing this now, 10 years from now, we’re going to be in deep, deep trouble.”