Fantastic. When we looked at trying to do an integrated alliance type of partnership, we first looked at best practices from around the world and within Canada as far as aboriginal employment engagement was concerned. We were able to look at very good learnings from other organizations, other communities, and other educational partners that have walked in our shoes before. We took that time to develop best practices. We just received the funding. We have a short 15-month delivery, so it's a lot of pressure to deliver the type of training and the amount of training that we're doing in the communities. When we went to the communities and we told them we had these opportunities for them, they've been waiting for three years for these opportunities so they came in waves.
The first program that we required everyone to go through was the mining essentials program. It was created in partnership with the Assembly of First Nations and the Mining Industry Human Resources Council. It's an absolutely tremendous program. It gives an overview of the industry. It gives them a lot of life skills and essential skills. This is where we've graduated the 160 candidates so far from. Now they have a great overview of the industry. They're committed to going to training on a daily basis. They have those skills. And now they can pick the skills training avenues that they would like to proceed in.
Noront believes in the test of workplace essential skills. Unlike other companies, in looking at the challenges we had with education—the majority of our communities are fly-in, fly-out communities with no high school located within the community—we had to look at how we could get people engaged, to be interested in training, how we could stay with them so that they could go to school or work. We've developed our models so that they can benefit by doing any of those types of training. But one of the key things is that we are not going to be requiring a grade 12 minimum education in order to get started in the process. We have to have an opportunity over the next 10 years to develop people's skills and talents. And so one of the small initiatives that we started early on was at the grade 11 level. It was looking at doing 110 hours of mining-specific curriculum. Kids had an opportunity at grade 11 to have specific training in mining.
I'm thinking back to three years at this already. We've done a lot of early engagement, and because of that, we've raised the interest in working in the mining sector. And this is why we're having the tremendous uptake on the aboriginal training alliance today. Again, the time pressure of the amount of training that we need to do in this short time period is enormous, but the community members are completely engaged and thrilled to be involved.