It's one of my favourite topics, because we have both the tradesmen's and tradeswomen's side, as well as the engineers and professionals we're bringing into the office.
On the trades side, we were always quite bullish in thinking and knowing that we were going to attract all these additional employees we needed, primarily because of lot of that steel or pipe or electrical work, to be honest with you, is no different out east, and a lot of those folks and skills had gone to Alberta.
We offered something different. You could be home every night. You could coach your kid in hockey. You weren't working in -20° weather. You weren't living in a man-camp. You weren't flying in and out. You weren't gone for Christmas. It was all those kinds of things. We thought we had something different. Then the oil price dropped, and our cup runneth over.
Through our unions we get close to a thousand requests for jobs a month. We can't keep up with what is being required. Thanks to the local supply of talented trades, we've dramatically changed the makeup of our tradesmen and tradeswomen. To be honest with you, in 2009, it was tradesmen. There weren't a lot of women in the trades, first because they were not attracted to it and second because employers didn't do the right things to pull females into the trades. We've been very active in that. We just did a $300,000 scholarship that was sent to Camosun College to solely focus on females in trades. We also gave $300,000 to BCIT to focus on aboriginals in trades, because that was another segment that has been missing in this component.
As we grow, we want to change the makeup of shipyarding from what it looked like in the past. We've dramatically lowered the average age, and now you will see not quite the same makeup of what you used to see in the past.
I'd like to refer to the engineering and professional staff, as we're producing a lot of new Canadians. When you go 30 years without producing large, complex ships, the people who worked in that area have either retired or unfortunately passed away, so we have gone worldwide. I know Irving Shipbuilding has been very efficient at this as well, and we've picked some of the best shipbuilders from around the world. We brought them here with their families and established and started them.
The federal government, by the way, as well as our provincial government, has done an outstanding job of helping us with immigration and bringing the right people in at the right time. That's what's grown our force in the engineering staff.
At the same time, we just created a $2-million investment in UBC's naval architecture and marine engineering group. The current need was too desperate. We had to get these people. The future shipbuilders are going to be homegrown as well, and we're going to help them do that.