July 9, 2009

Education

National construction college has a lot of Merit

STEPHEN DAFOE

correspondent

Nine months after its founding meeting, Merit Canada is well on its way to not only nationalizing the open shop concept, but the training of its 1,300 member companies.

But the Merit College of Construction won’t be passing out mortar board hats any time soon – the college is a concept rather than a brick and mortar institution.

“The college of construction is just kind of a convenient structure and vehicle to facilitate the training and to take courses across the country,” said Joel Thompson, vice president of Merit Contractors Association of Alberta.

“It is just a formalizing of the kind of training efforts that all the different provincial associations were doing anyway. Now we can have kind of a national credential for those that finish the course and it facilitates exchanging curriculum.”

Thompson explained that under the Merit College of Construction umbrella, a program developed in Nova Scotia or elsewhere, with solid materials and fills a need, can be used across the country.

“The training needs are pretty well transferable across the country,” explained Thompson.

“A lot of construction issues are local, like zoning or planning or licensing or insurance, but training issues or trade issues, they pretty well go across the country.

“All this stuff is very transportable, so there is no sense in every group reinventing the wheel to get to the same place all the time. The college allows us to assemble all that stuff together and facilitate delivery as well.”

So far the new training collective has rolled out one new course on a national level with another planned later this year.

The first was a seven-day intensive course on construction management, which was held in Banff, Alberta and drew participants from as far away as Ontario.

The second will be a project manager’s course for mechanical and electrical contractors to be held this fall.

Thompson explained that the courses are open to anyone in the construction industry, although the majority of participants have been employees of Merit Canada’s member companies.

Whatever the offering, Thompson said, Merit will try to offer courses that aren’t available at other institutions.

“The apprenticeship system is always kind of the standard of training in the construction industry, so we don’t want to duplicate those efforts,” he said.

“When we do training programs, it’s always meant to meet needs that aren’t addressed by the apprenticeship system. So we have a list of courses, some of them that we’ve been running for twenty years – things like rigging and hoisting, scaffolding, blueprint reading, surveying, those kinds of things that are meant to supplement the skills the guys get in trade school.”

Another long-standing program is the Supervisor Training Program (STP).

“It is kind of our flagship program,” Thompson said. It was created more than two decades ago when members were asked what they’d like their employees to learn.

“This one was first and foremost to give their frontline supervisors people skills,” he said.

The Merit VP explained that, since its inception, about 3,000 people have taken the course and that it continues to be Merit’s most popular and intensive program.

“There’s about 45 classroom hours,” Thompson said, adding that it is usually run two nights a week for seven weeks.

“It’s kind of a testament to the commitment to training because these guys come after work,” he said.

But Thompson is not the only one who sees the merit in the college’s Supervisory Training Program.

Michael Atkinson, president of the Canadian Construction Association said that the need for supervisory skills is something his organization has been aware of for some time.

“The Construction Sector Council has issued a report a couple years ago that says industry is going to need to re-engage about 21 per cent of the current supervisory work force in our industry, just because of demographics and retirement,” he said, adding that it represents almost 16,000 workers.

“So while a lot of the focus on so-called labour shortages – or skill shortages – in our industry has been focused on the on site or field workers, just as big, if not bigger problems, are people in our supervisory levels – people who are also on the high side of 50 and who are looking to retire in the next little while,” he said.

Atkinson explained how the upcoming retirements will create a need to train new supervisory personnel.

“There’s no question that there is a need and even though we are going through a bit of a dip in demand right now, that doesn’t matter,” he said.

“Six (or) seven years out, these people are still aging and regardless of the current demand cycle, we’re going to have to replace them.”

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