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Vancouver School Board touts training for trades

Annual event urges students to think outside employment box

Skylar Albrecht was about to be kicked out of Tupper secondary school when teacher Russ Evans took him under his wing.

“He was going to get booted with 10 feet on his butt,” Evans said. “He is smart. Generally, he was faster than his teachers and wasn’t actually too afraid of telling them that.”

Evans obtained permission to pull Albrecht out of regular classes. Instead of instructing Albrecht on how to calculate the volume of a cylinder on a chalkboard, Evans handed his student a lawn mower engine to perform the same computation.

The switch from textbooks and talking heads to working with his hands set Albrecht on a successful path to graduating high school and becoming a commercial saturation diver. The 28-year-old has dove to depths as great as 185 metres below sea level, worked in Korea, Norway and Australia, generally labours less than six months a year, and last year earned $200,000.

Albrecht was one of six former Vancouver School Board students who told 300 Grade 10 students from 10 schools about their successes in various trades at the third Journey Into the Trades event at Vancouver Technical secondary school Jan. 16.

Mark Jang, who attended a culinary ACE IT program — ACE IT programs allow students to attend trades training classes for a first level of training in an Industry Training Authority program, free of tuition — told teens he loves to play with fire and knives and works as a shift leader at Cactus Club.

Marco Wong, an electrician for the VSB, said his parents, like most, wanted him to pursue a university degree.

“Coming from an Asian family, you know, it’s pretty strict,” he said, to receptive laughter. “My older brother went to university first, so some of the pressure was off… Both my brothers actually want to get into the trades right now.”

Albrecht was one of the reasons Evans started Tupper Tech, which teaches 20 Grade 12 students trades skills and includes two work placements.

Evans said up to eight students are hired as apprentices each year and he makes sure they graduate high school.

“Loving school is really about being in the right program,” said Robin Kirk, vice principal of King George secondary who emceed the event.

She encouraged students to consider a trade or tech class for next year and to ask questions of the representatives of VSB programs, post-secondary institutions and industry associations who populated a trades fair after the panel concluded.

With the help of Evans, Albrecht completed two work experiences. He graduated from Tupper in 2004, discovered a seven-month waitlist for welding at BCIT, completed a seven-month steel fabrication course there instead and apprenticed at the Vancouver shipyards and drydock, where his crew dropped a 200,000-tonne ship the size of a school in the ocean.

Albrecht watched divers plunge into the water and then saw a giant section of steel those divers had attached to a crane emerge. He asked what training he needed to be one of those divers, served his two-week notice and paid $20,000 for a three-month dive school course in Ontario.

Albrecht returned to Vancouver, Nov. 17, 2008 and demanded a job. He was told don’t call us; we’ll call you.

“Nov. 19, I was getting off an airplane in Singapore to perform an emergency thruster repair,” he said.

“Invest in yourself. Make some money, get another ticket,” Albrecht told students. “Make it so that they want to hire you.”

Jennifer Kelly told listeners she wasn’t academically focused in high school; then she entered the ACE IT hairdressing program at Vancouver Technical secondary in 2010 and received training that would have cost upwards of $8,000 elsewhere, free of charge. Now she’s a top stylist, salon mentor and styling educator at an Aveda salon near UBC.

“You guys all have limitless potential,” Kelly said. “We all push our minds into a small world, but it’s actually really big. So just get your mind out of your own box. Remember that there’re tons of opportunities and things available if you are open.”

crossi@vancourier.com

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