By George Lee | The MacLeod Gazette
Welcome to build your own adventure, that challenging, interesting and well-paying career you design and launch with the help of Alberta’s skilled trades.
It’s a concept that threads its way through the stories of young adults tasked with sharing their insight and passion for the trades, helping the province find ways to improve the apprenticeship system and its profile in the Alberta economy.
Called Skilled Trades Youth Ambassadors, they speak of job versatility, variety and satisfaction, and how those qualities are amplified by opportunities to lead, mentor, teach, problem-solve, develop their skills, expand their knowledge and even compete.
And it all happens while putting hands and minds to the tasks before them in earn-as-you-learn careers.
Eden Marklund is a can’t-stand-still 22-year-old from Hinton, a three-hour drive west of Edmonton. For her, build your own adventure includes pivoting to a boilermaker apprenticeship after becoming a journeyperson welder.
Marklund has enjoyed “chasing the shutdowns” at industrial plants as a boilermaker, then heading back to the more predominantly welding world within a fabrication shop.
“If I see a good opportunity, I will take it as long as I’m happy with it,” she says. “There are just certain tickets I want to go get and just be able to kind of do everything. So I guess you could say that I do have a long-term goal, which would be just generally improving my knowledge and skills.”
How does Markland handle the off-season for boilermakers who chase shutdowns? “Not very well. Which is why I am back in a fab shop,” she quips.
Finding the Magic
Marklund is one of 11 young adults in the trades tagged as ambassadors. They serve on an advisory council linking the Alberta government to the ideas and experiences of apprentices and young tradespeople.
Established in May under the Government Organization Act, the program is part of a quest for “that magical secret ingredient” bridging government, the trades, post secondary schools, parents and young people for the benefit of all Albertans, says Advanced Education Minister Rajan Sawhney.
“Bureaucrats have very bureaucratic ideas. Politicians have very political ideas. I need something that is really going to resonate,” she says.
Sawhney already knows that apprenticeships are good for Alberta and the people who choose them.
“There are so many pathways individuals can take,” says Sawhney, the member for Calgary-North West. “If they’re entrepreneurs or joining major corporations, or doing various other things that the trades prepare them for, the reality is that there can be a lot of adventure involved in these careers.”
The adventure pursued by self-described robot-nerd Laine Van Hardeveld will likely lead to university. An ambassador who grew up in communities all over Alberta (and a bit of Saskatchewan), Van Hardeveld is a journeyperson millwright at work at a Calgary cheese plant.
Van Hardeveld is already trained as a mechanical engineering technologist specializing in automation and robotics. She sees herself earning engineering degrees and joining the ranks of researchers who drive the tech and knowledge economy.
“I can’t speak for anybody else, but for me, my career is very much about finding complementary things, things that work together,” says Van Hardeveld, 25. “My choices have been based around what’s going to help me most within the robotics realm.”
At first glance, the career path of welder Ben Rainforth might appear less sparkly than Van Hardeveld’s. But there’s plenty going on in his life, too, as he does what he loves and eyes his future.
The 22-year-old youth ambassador pictures a day when he’ll operate the family farm east of Lacombe — but not necessarily and probably not exclusively. After all, there’s that informal offer to become a college welding instructor to consider.
And let’s not forget the pressing concern of getting ready for representing Canada and Alberta on the international stage at the 47th WorldSkills competition in Lyon, France, Sept. 10-15, stemming from Rainforth’s provincial success in Skills Canada. The international network of competitions is responsible for first opening his mind to the breadth of the trades.
In 2009 Calgary hosted WorldSkills. Rainforth’s carpentry teacher grandfather and dad “took all of us kids down there, and we spent the day touring around. That was my first introduction to all the trades – because in my head, there were only about six of them.”
Experiencing the big city and mingling with thousands of people and competitors from around the world? It was culture shock for a seven-year-old from a farm near the tiny village of Clive in central Alberta.
The event even gave him a chance to try welding with his own hands for the first time.
“So that was a pretty big eye opener for me.”
Indeed, Rainforth grew up learning that the trades were valid, honourable careers. Home schooled until Grade 10, for most of his life he wasn’t aware of the negative stigma they sometimes carry.
“I was pretty much in college before I found out that people thought the trades were, you know, below them or whatever,” says Rainforth.
Drudgery and a head-down shuffle to the shop floor? Not in Rainforth’s world.
“I can go to work, take pride in my work and be happy every time I leave that I’ve accomplished something,” he says. “To essentially build something from nothing, or to help somebody get their tractor back on the road, or little stuff like that that impacts farmers and whoever else – for me that is really rewarding.
“A lot of people miss that when they when they think of the trades. They just turn their nose up and think it’s gross work. But the trades are called skilled trades for a reason, and that’s because you have to be skilled to do them.”
Rainforth says he lucked out with his position with a shop in Lacombe, a small city about 30 kilometres north of Red Deer and the centre of a strong mixed-farming community. His employer fabricates for industries like agriculture, oil and gas, and even solar power – ranging from small custom jobs to contracts with major construction companies.
“Pretty much everything that a welder sees, we’ve done at that shop. Which is pretty crazy, especially when you’re starting out,” he says. “My days are rarely the same. The longest I work on a job is maybe a week or two, and then I’m doing something completely different.”
What the Minister Sees
Eden Marklund, Laine Van Hardeveld and Ben Rainforth have caught the minister’s attention. “All three of these folks have natural leadership qualities and the world is their oyster,” says Sawhney. “They have tremendous humility, and they’re all so very talented.”
And for the record, Rainforth’s farmer-who-welds option is nothing to look down upon, Sawhney says. “Farmers feed the world and farmers feed Albertans. And if that’s his pathway, it’s a very noble one. I would be very encouraging of that or whatever he decides to do.”
On and off the farm, tradespeople of every ilk are becoming increasingly important as the economy continues to rebuild and refocus after the peak years of COVID-19.
The province earlier in 2024 announced funding worth $24-million a year over the next three years to create 3,200 apprenticeship seats at 11 post-secondary schools. That brought its yearly spending on apprenticeships to $78-million.
Sawhney says curriculum updates are a big post-secondary need, and so far her department is investing $10-million a year in them.
“There are other things that can be done, too, like speeding up Red Seal harmonization across the different provinces and speeding up credentialing for newcomers from other jurisdictions who have trade certificates.” (A Red Seal shows that a tradesperson has met their trade’s national standard in Canada.)
A key career advantage of apprenticeships, Sawhney notes, is that students’ positions are kept open when they go to school. Student debts tend to be smaller and employers work in concert with schools by providing on-the-job training. Apprentices are usually paid employment insurance benefits during their classroom stints.
Says Marklund: “The one thing I really loved about getting a trade was that once you go through all that bookwork and everything like that, and you’re working out in the field, everything just kind of fits together. And you’re like, Oh, I learned this in school. I don’t need to be taught this. I understand this.”
The Provincial Picture
That hit-the-job-running aspect of the trades answers a loud knock of opportunity echoing through Alberta.
Sawhney says: “There’s incredible opportunity in the trades. All those pipelines that get built, all the work that happens in the energy industry, in petrochemicals, in housing, every industry that you can think of — they all require tradespeople.”
Workforce development is her department’s overlying theme. “And what that means is that we have to come up with strategy, tactics and investments to make sure that we’re tackling this problem from every angle.”
Still, the economic numbers aren’t all positive. Despite high employment demand and shortages in some sectors and occupations, economic indicators are mixed. Statistics Canada estimates the province’s unemployment rate as of June 30 at 7.1 per cent, compared with the national figure of 6.4 per cent.
Gross domestic product struggles, too. The consensus was that GDP would go up by more than two per cent in 2023. But TD Economics pegged the actual growth at 1.5 per cent, classifying Alberta as “middle of the pack” and short of expectations.
Alberta did notch Canada’s fastest population growth in the first three months of this year. Statistics Canada estimated that the population reached about 4.85 million, up by nearly 50,000 people.
StatsCan also estimated the increase of migration from other parts of the country at a net 12,482 — by far the highest rate of just three provinces and territories registering any net gain at all.
Using the Consumer Price Index as a measure, Alberta had Canada’s fourth highest inflation rate in June 2024. The CPI went up to 3.0 per cent from 2.7 per cent the preceding June, but the province did have lower inflation than Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Ontario.
The housing gap, an estimate of the number of unbuilt dwelling units between supply and demand, persists in 2024. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation projects the gap in Alberta from 2023 to 2030 at between 130,000 and 170,000 units.
Filling the housing gap and meeting other needs of a growing population are factors pointing the job market at trades, Sawhney said.
The trades’ popularity is reflected in apprentice registration numbers, which were recently pegged at up almost 28 per cent over last year to about 61,000 apprentices.
‘Lead the Change’
Numbers like those demonstrate the demand for skilled trades, and Laine Van Hardeveld is thrilled to fly their flag.
“One of my favourite aspects of being an ambassador is getting to lead that change,” she says. “I get to help create a much more supportive and engaging environment for apprenticeships, so that people are not turned away from them because they’re worried about how they’re going to get treated,” she says.
“It’s like, no. If anything, you should be getting treated better because you’re taking the initiative to join the trades. You are choosing every single day to go to work and to learn about the trade you’re in.”
Van Hardeveld concludes: “I’m extremely passionate about the trades and I love them dearly. I want anyone and everyone to be able to find that same level of passion and love for their job that I have.”
