Episode 2: Start me up

Jenny Tung  00:02

So this was the beginning of the night. We’re gonna bring 737 Max aircraft in for overnight checks. Typically aircraft flies during the day and we bring it in overnight to do,

Bianca Rego  00:15

This is Jenny Tung on a typical day at work.

Jenny Tung  00:18

So today, this aircraft will undergo a major lubrication task, which we will— a lot of fly control surfaces get used when the aircraft flies.

Bianca Rego  00:28

She’s an aircraft maintenance engineer for Air Canada, she checks over and fixes airplanes so your flight gets where it’s going safely and on time.

Jenny Tung  00:38

We’re gonna remove some panels and hopefully do some inspections. In the morning you’ll depart going to L.A, San Francisco, where Air Canada flies.

Bianca Rego  00:46

Jenny loves her job, but for the longest time, Jenny had no idea she could ever have this kind of career.

Jenny Tung  00:54

During my tender years in high school, we were very, very academically focused like praise wasn’t a thing. It’s like a taboo. And I didn’t know that apparently, you can become an automotive mechanic; you can become an aircraft maintenance engineer.

Bianca Rego  01:14

She had her Aha moment one day when her dad took her to work.

Jenny Tung  01:18

There was a “take your kids to work day” and I went with my, my father who was in aviation. I literally went to YVR, worked the night shift with my dad’s friends and, uh, and, and it was like, wow, this is so cool. Right? Like, you know, maybe I could do this. And when I hit Grade 11, I took Automotive 11 and, um, and that time I found out I was actually a very good hands-on. I didn’t know that before.  And then I was like, you know what, I’m not going to university.

Bianca Rego  01:51

What Jenny’s describing is a perfect example of something called “career connected learning.” It’s a real thing, and it can really help students navigate today’s quickly evolving working environments.  I’m Bianca Rego and welcome to Fireweed, a podcast brought to you by the British Columbia Institute of Technology. Did you know that Fireweed is the first plant to grow back after a forest fire. It’s an incredibly tough and beautiful plant. So on this show, we tap into one of the fireweed’s best qualities: resilience. Our goal is to explore stories of adaptation and meet people who are shifting their behaviour to meet the challenges of our contemporary world. To tackle things like climate warming, digitization, social unrest, and a rapidly shifting job market. Today we’re talking about how young graduates and the people who hire them are navigating the demands of the modern workplace through career connected learning. But before we jump into it, if you have a great story of shifting your pattern to suit the new now, please email me at fireweed@bcit.ca. For me, one of the most surprising things about the pandemic was how it changed the way people think about work. Millions of North Americans quit their jobs over the last couple of years. For Gen Z and millennials a recent survey found that 52% are considering changing employers sometime this year. That’s a lot of churn. So on the one hand, employers are desperately trying to hang on to employees. But strangely, while this is all going on, the youth unemployment rate in Canada is twice as high as the national average. So what’s up with that? There’s another issue too. A lot of jobs formerly done by humans are being replaced by automation. All of this adds up to a complicated environment for today’s grads. To help me understand this a bit better. Joan Pascual is here. She’s the program head of BCIT’s Centre for Workplace Education. And she’s in charge of BCIT’s career-connected learning programs. I mentioned that employers are having a hard time finding employees and at the same time the youth unemployment rate is very high. So at first glance, that seems illogical. So how do you describe the working environment young people are graduating into right now.

Joan Pascual  04:32

So the pandemic has really affected the type of jobs that youth traditionally go into. So if you think about what the kind of first jobs that you’ve ever had, they’re typically in recreation and cultures, so you might be working in summer camps or direct centre. You might be working at McDonald’s or as a salesperson at the mall. But when you think about it, when the pandemic hit, those were the first jobs affected and they were the slowest jobs to come back. Things closed, people weren’t shopping in person or online, so a lot of youth just kind of left the workforce altogether as a result of the pandemic, and that those jobs that had traditionally available for them were no longer available. I do think that as we’re coming out, there are a lot more opportunities. But now youth are back in school, they’re taking different courses and they’re not necessarily wanting to come back to those roles in food service, or sales, or youth and recreation. I think that’s one of the big reasons employers are having a hard time hiring for those entry level positions. Another part of it is the mismatch of what students are learning versus what is needed in industry. So you might have heard that trades is a really big part of it, fewer and fewer students are going into trades. But there’s still a need to do that. So the big mismatch of skills is I think one of the reasons why we have a high youth unemployment rate.

Bianca Rego  05:57

Most Canadians get like some type of degree after graduating from high school, is the problem with the type of education people are getting? Because I’m curious, what skills do employers say their recently graduated employees are lacking?

Joan Pascual  06:12

It always comes down to communication skills, right? A lot of employers’ perspective and viewpoint is I can teach this student or this entry level employee the technical skills they need to do the job that I have, I can’t teach them how to work with my team, to get along with my team, to communicate effectively with people in the organization and outside the organization. Those are the skills that they are wanting from young people.

Bianca Rego  06:38

Let’s get on the idea of career-connected learning or work integrated learning. How would you describe what that is?

Joan Pascual  06:46

I would say work integrated learning are opportunities or programs within educational programs, such as degree or diploma, where you can get experience applying your skills in the real world. So with an actual company, and this can come in many different forms. And this idea of worker integrated learning has been around for a long time, like over 100 years. And over time, we’ve kind of expanded that to include different programs of various lengths. So you have things like cooperative education, which can be like eight months long, you have things like entrepreneurship, where you know, somebody mentors you to start a business, service learning, research projects, practicums, field placements, anytime that you have the opportunity to take what you’ve learned in class and apply it to a real world problem with people that are outside of your organization is what I would define as work integrated learning.

Bianca Rego  07:39

And what makes a good work integrated learning program?

Joan Pascual  07:44

Work integrated learning, I see it is a partnership between the post secondary institution, employers as well as the student. So what makes a good program would be a strong partnership between the three. So you have industry who has a clearly defined idea of a role or a project that a student can do, and has the opportunity to mentor it, it’s they know that it’s not just, you know, okay I’m hiring this person to do some extra work for me, they know that the person is there to learn, and they’re willing to provide the supervision and guidance in order to do the project well. The student also should have the willingness to learn, take initiative, be able to contribute to the project. So they know that it’s not a job shadowing, they’re not there to watch. They’re there to contribute and work along with the team in a student level and an entry level way, and a post secondary institution is there to provide those connections, right? So a lot of the time and you can see this, right in lots of different areas. It’s like how do you find the right person to do the job? How do you find employers who want to hire students? Right? So when you have somebody in the middle who can connect the right students with the right employers with the right opportunities, and oversee the quality of it, then I think that you have a really good work integrated learning program.

Bianca Rego  09:03

Yeah, I completely agree. That’s actually how I wound up in this job. How does work integrated learning help with communication skills, like those soft skills that are missing?

Joan Pascual  09:20

I think that the key thing is it actually puts you in front of professionals that are already in the field. So in class, you might be writing a paper, or you might have to do an oral presentation, but it’s not a huge part of your day. For example, I’m working right now with students in the technology sector, so students who want to be computer programmers, or IT professionals, they have all of the technical knowledge to do the job. They know how computers and networks work back and forth. However, when I go in and ask them, what is it that you’re learning the most about during your job? The answer is always really about how they’re communicating. I’ve learned a lot about how to explain technical concepts to clients that are not very technical, I’ve learned a lot about how to give appropriate timelines about when they can complete the work. I’ve learned a lot about how to ask questions, and it just through the daily practice and mentorship, right, because you have a team member there, where it’s like, oh, this is how you can just tell a customer how to do this, right. And in fact, what’s really great work integrated learning is, when you come back to classes, you have that knowledge so people who didn’t do your job will learn from you as well, because you can pass on that, ‘Hey, this is I faced this problem at work. This is how I approached it’, and your teammates will be like, ‘Oh, great, that’s really helpful for us to know’.

Bianca Rego  10:38

You’ve seen a lot of students go in and out of different careers and coming back to class and watching their transformation is there one specific instance that you can think of, that kind of epitomizes the benefits of career integrated learning?

Joan Pascual  10:55

I had a student who is straight out of high school, and it was really intimidating for her to come to BCIT, because a lot of the students that she’s surrounded by, are like professionals who are retraining. So they’re a lot older, they have a lot more experience, they’ve experienced what it was like to work in a job before. So when I met her, she was really not very confident in her skills. And as part of communicating and getting a job. I supported her with trying to portray herself as more confident and learning how to talk about her skill set to future employers. She worked really hard to go to interviews, and she finally secured a position and she was really happy. When she started, she was quite quiet. And the comments that the supervisor made is ‘Oh, I really wish you know, I think she’s smart. She’s very diligent, and she’s very detail oriented. But I wish she would speak up a little bit more during team meetings, I think she has a lot to say’. Through that encouragement and feedback from her supervisors, she did start to speak up more, she learned that, hey, I have something of value to say they value my opinions. Even though I’m the youngest person on the team. I know what I’m doing, I’m getting a lot more confidence in my skill set. I’m realizing I like the data analytics part of my job. And as a result, she developed a relationship with her employer to say, the other team doing data analytics is something that’s really interesting to me, is it possible that I can talk to them or do a project for them, the supervisor was all on board. So she had meetings with the data analytics department, she learned about what they did, what type of skills that they need, what type of tools that they use, and she throughout it, she’s like, I’m excited about my career, I know where I want to go. And so that is what I think is a really great work integrated learning opportunity. You have, you’re doing the work, you have a supervisor or mentor that is engaged in your development and finds opportunities for you to grow and explore what type of different career paths are available for you to get to a little bit of spirit set to inspire you. And in fact, after she graduates, the supervisor, you know, really likes her and is, you know, encouraging her to apply for full time positions at their company. And she will have an in because she already knows a lot of people and she has a network.

Bianca Rego  13:09

This is Fireweed, a podcast brought to you by the British Columbia Institute of Technology. I’m Bianca Rego and we’re talking about how Gen Zers, millennials and their employers are adapting to the demands of the 21st century workplace. Coming up, we’re going to learn how career-connected learning programs can help as human powered jobs are replaced by automation. But first I want to tell you about some of BCIT’s great programs. BCIT has more programs tailored to meet the needs of the transportation industry than any other school in the province. That includes programs such as aircraft, gas turbine, aircraft maintenance engineering, and airport operations. Learn by experience through real world education. Start your hands on learning at bcit.ca/trades. Okay, I want to go back to Jenny Tung for a minute. She talked about how going to work with her dad and taking a shop class convinced her not to go to university. She came to BCIT instead for a two year program and then after that she had to do a two year apprenticeship. And she told us that pretty much cemented things for her.

Jenny Tung  14:24

I would say though, work integrated experience is more important than school, right? Because in school you learn the ideas, you learn how to be safe around your workplace. Like, you know, school is one thing, but out on the field actually on live aircraft is where, you know, you have to learn really quick. You have to be winning, right. You have to have problem solving skills.  Right? That is where that puts the individual to the test. So basically it is 100% of where I decided to continue with my career right If I can actually cope with all those situations.

Bianca Rego  15:04

So what do you make of Jenny’s comments about the importance of testing your skills in the field?

Joan Pascual  15:10

I completely agree with her. And one of the reasons it’s because I’ve been in her situation myself, I mean, when I was a university student, while I was not an aircraft mechanic, I was at a university floundering around trying to find out what it is I could do with my Bachelor of Arts degree. And when I look back at my university experience, the thing I remembered most is my two coop work terms at two different companies. One of the roles that I got was working for the government. And I remember one of the first tasks they asked me do is the Minister is going to open this new facility, can you write a drafted a speech for them, and I was like, oh, you’re giving this to me as a student. And I realized, this is where my all my writings and term papers came in, because I knew how to write and it gave me a lot of confidence in my skill set to do that. And so what also work integrated learning does and as Jenny said, is it allows you to realize what you do, or you don’t want to do. And so you could try something for, you know, a term and realize, I did this for four months, when I realized this is not something I want to do for the rest of my life. Right. So I wholeheartedly agree with Jenny, because I do think that when you look back at your experiences, it’s the examples of times where you got to apply your learning that you will remember the most,

Bianca Rego  16:31

Let’s go back to the automation thing. We know automation is causing a lot of disruption in the workplace, I’ve read that something like 20% of workers are going to be displaced over the next decade. So what difference would career-connected learning programs make for those workers?

Joan Pascual  16:49

Yeah, we’re seeing it right away in industries you’ve never even thought about that could be automated in the future, because a lot of the jobs that automation replaces are the jobs that require the least amount of skill set. So when all of these jobs are being automated and displaced, I think the hardest part is sorting through the information out there about where are the jobs going to be in the future, what skills are needed. And so by actually being in a job in the industry, you’re getting a better sense of all of that information through talking to people, through the networks, and that you can build your skills that are actually needed for the future. So that you’re kind of not left behind once these jobs are automated.

Bianca Rego  17:34

That’s very interesting. I never thought about it that way. So I think that you’ve basically answered all of our questions, and you’ve been so phenomenal and you’ve taught me so much. So thank you very much for all of your time.

Joan Pascual  17:45

You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.

Bianca Rego  17:46

And for all of your knowledge.

Joan Pascual  17:47

Yeah, thank you.

Bianca Rego  17:48

Of course, it was our pleasure. So thank you so much.

Joan Pascual  17:51

Thank you.

Bianca Rego  17:53

You’ve been listening to Fireweed a podcast brought to you by BCIT. I’m your host, Bianca Rego and I myself played around a little bit with a form of career-connected learning during my time at BCIT. The journalism program had an internship setup and mine was in, you guessed it, podcasting. A big thank you to my guests Jenny Tung, Aircraft Maintenance Engineer and BCIT grad and Joan Pascal program head of BCIT Centre for Workplace Education. If you liked what you heard, I hope you’ll keep listening and sharing episodes. Help us spread the word about some of the incredible adaptation, ingenuity and resourcefulness we have in this region. If you have a comment on a story, or an idea for an episode, reach out to me through email at fireweed@bcit.ca. Thanks for listening. Fireweed is brought to you by BCIT with story and audio production by JAR Audio.