Every year, a new group of students gets ready to leave high school and get ready for their eventual careers and future. Career Explorations is meant to show students their options and what they can do when they leave school. Exhibitors from across Western Canada and into North Dakota showcased their opportunities to the over 2,000 students in the Parkland region.
One of the big areas of the annual event is the Try a Trade area, where students can get hands on experience with different trades through various hands-on experiences. Dale Holstein, Coordinator for Post-Secondary and Industrial at Parkland College, says it is an exciting time for trades and industrial education in Yorkton, and with new facilities and programs they can better train students throughout the area.
“There are always lots of job opportunities in the trades. We actually have some students who are farmers that are taking it so they can go back to the farm and fix their own stuff.”
They are also excited to see more women taking up the trades, Holstein says, with ten per cent of the students being female, which he describes as huge. While emphasizing there have always been more women than you expect in the programs, he says more women joining the programs is exciting for the college.
“That’s what they want to do, that’s where their goal is.”
Students could try out a Caterpillar grader simulator, for example. Developed to get operators comfortable with a new, steering wheel-free model of grader, the setup was popular among the students visiting the Flexihall. Holstein says it’s a great way to get students into the area, because it’s a draw to get them talking about industrial and trades education.
“The reason the simulator was designed was to train the old operators, the ones who had driven with a steering wheel in the past... They let them play with that for two or three days to get the hang of it, instead of crashing into something and wrecking the new machine.”
