Connecting Employers With Skilled Tradeswomen In New Brunswick
As New Brunswick faces a labour shortage due to an aging population set to retire in droves in the next decade, an organization designed to help employers find skilled trades workers has opened shop in the province.
The Office to Advance Women Apprentices – a successful Newfoundland and Labrador-based program, aimed at advancing women in the skilled trades – has expanded, establishing offices in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, PEI, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.
The office’s mandate is to assist women in finding employment in their trade, and to provide support through wrap-around services enabling them to advance through their apprenticeship to Red Seal status. Joanne Gormley, project co-ordinator for New Brunswick, says the office also helps these women work through other barriers and issues they face along the way.
“The goal is to help women past, present, and future. Those who may have a trade but never found a position for different reasons, those currently working in their chosen trade, or women looking to get into the trades,” says Gormley.
That’s not just good for women interested in the trades, but also great news for employers!
An Employer’s Perspective
Monty Butt, who owns an electrical company in St. John’s, NL, says the office has helped connect him with qualified employees. He contacted the office for the first time about eight years ago and has since hired eight tradeswomen through the program. The office has been able to help him find workers quickly and efficiently.
“Usually if I call them in the morning, by lunch time that day they’d have three or four resumes for me to pick from,” he says. “They’ve got a great program and they’re very helpful.”
The Office to Advance Women Apprentices executive director Karen Walsh says the key to the program’s success is its wrap-around service model, offering free services and employment supports like resume writing, career counselling, and interview preparation. Education, communication, and partnership are the three pillars of the organization.
The office also works with employers and organizations to provide diversity and inclusion training, both to improve their diversity, and to assist with their women’s employment plan.
Walsh says that employers are taking advantage of the services of this office and have incorporated the programming in their companies, making them more inclusive for tradeswomen on job sites. After all, employers have told her women fit the bill of what they’re looking for: homegrown apprentices who want long-term employment.
The Newfoundland and Labrador office now receives requests on a regular basis for employers wanting to hire tradeswomen, and colleges are seeing more women studying non-traditional skilled trades.
Success Story
Stephanie Courage, who is now a journeyperson plumber from Newfoundland, says the office’s work is important because women often have difficulty finding or keeping a job even though they enjoy it and do it very well. Because often there’s only one or very few women on the job sites, they’re noticed more than others, she says.
“There’s always a spotlight on you to perform at 100 percent, and if you’re 97 percent one day, somebody will notice,” Courage says. “Women can also be overlooked for jobs because some teams are ‘nervous having women around.’ We’re only going to work through that by getting more women on the job and having the men see the quality of their work.”
The office has helped Courage launch her career. Back in 2010, when she was looking for her first apprenticeship job, confidence was something she had to build up.
“It takes a lot of gall for a young female, new to the industry, to put herself out there, to visit shops, talk to companies and ask for a shot. It’s quite intimidating for a woman, especially when she’s going into a shop full of men,” Courage says. “The confidence to do that was one of the most valuable things I got from the Office to Advance Women Apprentices.”
The Office to Advance Women Apprentices has seen great results from its work. In Newfoundland and Labrador 10 years ago, only 3 percent of workers in the trades were women. Now, it’s between 12 and 14 percent.
The office has registered more than 2,000 tradeswomen in their database, and have assisted with over 1,400 employment opportunities. They’ve helped 176 women through their apprenticeship to Red Seal status, while hundreds of others are working through their apprenticeship right now.
The New Brunswick Experience
The New Brunswick office has already started its outreach to employers and is making connections with local women in trades. They’ve developed a database to track these women, offer monthly networking events, and are eager to start rolling out the support which will help women in this province advance in the skilled trades and fill gaps for contractors as the need continues to rise.
Gormley says tradeswomen are registering in our New Brunswick database and it’s growing all the time. She says she was pleasantly surprised by all the stories shared by the women at the three networking events held so far in New Brunswick. The pride these tradeswomen have in what they have accomplished is empowering and inspirational.
For more information about the Office to Advance Women Apprentices visit https://www.womenapprentices.ca/new-brunswick/ featuring the stories of employers and tradeswomen throughout the country.
This story was sponsored by The Office to Advance Women Apprentices.