A Sault College machine shop instructor wants to see more kids getting their hands dirty.
With over 30 years of experience in the trades, Peter Corbett is sharing his wealth of knowledge with younger students to help keep the passion for trades alive.
Last week, Corbett hosted his first ever machine shop summer camp, where he invited Grade 7 and 8 students into the shop at Sault College for a week-long series of hands-on activities and demonstrations.
Corbett is among many tradespeople who are concerned that not enough young people are entering the industry.
“There’s nobody coming to replace us; that’s why I targeted the Grade 7 and 8 students,” he says. "You want to try and catch their interest ahead of time so they can have a plan early on instead of being in Grade 11 or 12 and saying, ‘I don’t know what I want to do'.”
From fabrication and repair work at Algoma Steel to oil and gas work in Red Deer, Alberta – Corbett has seen it all.
He started his apprenticeship back in 1985 in Thunder Bay when those areas of work were in high demand and difficult to break into.
The long-time tradesman explains there has been a complete paradigm shift in the field.
“The demand for trades people is astronomical,” he says. “There’s kids now that can just walk right into an apprenticeship after graduating high school, which is awesome.”
With the help from his colleagues Gord Irvine, Mike Hicks, and Evan McLean, last week was the first time Corbett ran the machine shop summer program, which helped students learn about computer programming, manufacturing, and assembly-type practices.
Each student even got to take home a model cannon they made during the week.
“We had so much fun,” he says. “When I saw 13 cannons go out the door with a smile on every face, and kids asking me to run version 2.0 next year – I know it had an impact.”
Corbett explains the trades is a very satisfying area of work to be involved with but notes there’s a stigma that deters many from entering the field.
“The work is out there, the people aren’t,” he says. “My hope is that the kids will go home full of excitement, allowing the parents to hop on board and they start encouraging them to pursue it.”
Among Corbett’s 13 students at the summer camp were three females, which he says is incredibly reassuring for the industry’s future.
“Women in the trades are becoming more and more popular,” he says. “I encourage girls as much as I do boys and minorities and everybody else to go for it. Anybody is capable of doing it if they set their mind to it. Some of my best students have been female. It’s so encouraging.”
From Aug. 8-12, Corbett and his colleagues will be hosting another machine shop camp at Sault College for Grade 7 and 8 students who have an Indigenous background.
The Indigenous-focused program will run from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day.
Interested registrants can sign up online, or email [email protected].