Distinguished committee members, thank you for inviting me to appear today.
I'd like to start with a story that will illustrate how important it is to individuals and to us as a nation to champion the cause of women in trades. It's the story of one of our participants. Her name is Kaitlin. She lives in the Okanagan College region and she came from a family in which income assistance was a generational challenge. Her mother and her grandmother had been on income assistance for years and years. In order for her to take a trades foundation program at Okanagan College, she would need to let go of that assistance, and that was a real challenge for her based on her family history. So with a lot of support and encouragement, Kaitlin decided to take a student loan and enrol in the welding program. She completed the program and within 60 days of program completion she was hired at a job site in Alberta. After eight to 10 months of work, she returned to the campus to check in and see about incentives for apprentices and also to bring her T4 slip to show to the chairperson of the welding department that she had earned over $120,000 that year. She was actually excited to file her first ever tax return to show earned income. I think for her whole family this was a win.
Just to give you a little bit of background on Okanagan College, we provide women in trades training programs across four regions of the southern interior of British Columbia. We were fortunate enough to receive funding from 2008 to 2014 through the labour market agreement funding. Currently we are receiving funding through the Canada jobs fund agreement. During this time we've trained more than 650 women who have participated in over 800 training interventions.
I'm pleased to report to you today that this ongoing investment in and commitment to skills training for women is working well in British Columbia. Prior to the Women in Trades initiative at Okanagan College, women made up only 7% of the total number of students in trades and apprenticeship programs. Over this time period, so within six years, we now represent over 13%, so we have effectively doubled the rate of participation by women in six years. There's still a lot of work to do, but the trend is going in the right direction, especially when demographics are pointing to a gap between the number of jobs that will be available and the number of people who will fill them.
We consider ourselves to be a service and support centre because our funding pays for training interventions for the women but also for a lot of different supports. We deliver two streams of training. The first one is an exploratory program that's 12 weeks long. That program is open to any woman who meets the eligibility criteria and has a general interest in exploring trades as a career. It's an all-female introductory program in which women get to have hands-on experience in five or six different trades. Embedded in this program are essential skills training and also employment readiness training. We find that these are some of the things that are barriers to women getting jobs in trades. These help women to build confidence as well as to make an informed decision about which trade they would like to pursue for a career.
The second stream of training is in the trades foundation programs like welding, which I mentioned earlier. These women are ready to be integrated into the already-scheduled trades foundation programs and work alongside their male counterparts to get ready for employment on the job. In this type of program they receive level one technical training towards their apprenticeship. Most of our apprenticeships are four years in length, and so this gives them the first year and a good start at employment.
We usually train between 100 and 110 women per year. Of the women who take the trades foundation programs and become certified in a specific discipline, 75% will become employed within six months of completing their training. Approximately 50% of the women who participate in the exploratory Gateway to the Building Trades for Women program will move on to take that next step of further training to make them more employable. Only 1% of people who take the exploratory gateway program go directly into work and become apprentices. Most of our women require further training to make a meaningful connection with the labour market in skilled trades.
We have a unique approach. Collaboration and design are important aspects of our program as is working closely with the communities where we deliver programming. Employers have been generous in allowing us access to industry mentors, and those are a crucial part of our program. The industry mentors are women in trades who have often been in trades for 25 or 30 years, from a time before these were women-friendly types of occupations. They have developed skills that are really valuable to share with our new women coming in, and so we rely heavily on our industry mentors to support our program.
Early engagement is vital to increasing participation of women over the long run, so we do some work with the school districts as well to try to engage the instructional staff in the K-to-12, and most specifically the K-to-9 system, to help them understand the role of trades and how important they are, because without their help in bringing that to the younger women, we are not going to get them interested. We are learning that they make their career plans in grades 7 and 8, so we know we need to be talking to them before that. And, wouldn't you know, most of the elementary school teachers are women. So we need to work with them so they're not afraid of the tools.
We deliver an event called Maker Days. This has grown out of the Maker Movement and this has been a great way to engage younger women. We do it for elementary school groups, usually 80 or 100 kids. We give them an ill-defined problem and let them work on developing a solution and building a prototype. This has been a really great way to engage women in trades and STEM activities. We also do the Maker Days as a professional development activity for the instructors, to put them through the paces. This takes a lot of their fear away so they can bring these types of activities back to their students.
At the college we also engage in other activities to focus on engaging younger people. We have a spaghetti bridge-building contest. We have RoboCup. We have trade simulators that we drag to the schools and we let everyone try to lay down a bead for welding, and we have outreach programs.
We offer participant supports to our women who are in programs. They are program-specific and tailored to meet the needs of individual women. The barriers are different for different women. We sponsor them for tuition, books, tools, and what we call personal protective equipment, PPE, which is trade-specific. Other supports include access to industry mentors, which I've mentioned, and peer tutors, as well as upgrading, counselling, and job coaches. The women in trades team provides an ear if someone is having a rough day or needs moral support and encouragement. Also, there's a referral centre for other types of supports. Participants can access fitness equipment and group classes to gain strength and flexibility to avoid injury on the job.
I'm going to give you another example, of someone named Alyssa. It shows how some of these supports come into play.
Alyssa heard about our program through a teammate at a soccer match and she was interested, so she joined the Gateway program. She was one of the very few who went to work directly after completing the Gateway program, so she became an apprentice at a family-owned construction company and was part of a framing crew. After a year on the job, she came back into college for her level-one technical training, but she really struggled with the math. She got a tutor assigned by our team, and by working with the tutor for three weeks, she was able to pass her level one and carry on with her job. After about another year, she was injured on the job and she was off work for a couple of months. At that time she considered leaving carpentry after being quite badly injured. So we assigned an industry mentor who worked with her for a period of several weeks. Alyssa returned to the job and is still working as a carpenter today. Fast forward until now, and she's on track to get her Red Seal certification by the end of this year, and we have hired her back as an industry mentor to support the new women coming into training this year.
We've been having some challenges. We have capacity issues. Our college is too small. We don't have enough space to train enough women, so we are undergoing a $33-million trades expansion and renovation project. That is going to increase access for all kinds of people. We're going to build a new trades centre and that's going to increase capacity for women, and of course, in order to increase capacity, we require further funding. The challenge is that we are only able to bid for and acquire a certain number of dollars of support for our women, and that does hold us back.
Retention is an emerging issue for women in the trades. We know there's a problem with women staying in the trade after the first year. A lot of them are dropping off after that first year. We also know that a four-year apprenticeship is not a straightforward path for many of our women. It may take up to seven years for them to complete that traditional, four-year apprenticeship, mainly because of stopping for children and things like that. Life gets in the way.
Women are struggling without mentorship on the job, and some workplaces are still less than desirable, and that makes them feel uncomfortable. So we're learning that women without adequate support on the job are leaving for other employment. We have a best practices guide for employing women in the trades. There's a free link I've included in my presentation.
I just want to finish up and say that there's a strong need for continued investment in skills training for women and other non-traditional learner groups. Additionally, we need to examine post-training employment challenges and work with employers to create the necessary conditions to support our non-traditional workers. I have noticed a positive shift in the culture and environment in skilled trades training to make it more welcoming to non-traditional participants, and as we increase the number of female participants in trades training programs, and correspondingly in industry, a new culture is emerging.
Kaitlin and Alyssa are just two of the 650 success stories that we could tell about Okanagan College's Women in Trades program. With ongoing investment from the federal and provincial governments, we could turn that number into thousands, or hundreds of thousands.
Thank you very much.