During the Jan. 23 Thompson Chamber of Commerce meeting, manager Tim Gibson updated local business owners about the status of the Northern Workforce Development Centre (NWDC), established at Thompson’s University College of the North (UCN) campus last May.
While many of the NWDC’s job programs and classes were delivered in the Hub of the North throughout 2018, Gibson said UCN also celebrated the grand opening of a sister centre in Swan River on Dec. 17.
Gibson told the Nickel Belt News that the new Swan Valley Workforce Development Centre, like its Thompson counterpart, will serve as a means of providing industry-specific training opportunities to meet labour market needs.
“Swan Valley is in a different region, so you can expect more agricultural projects and things like that,” Gibson said Jan. 29. “They have lumber products as well. They have spruce products … so there’s some big industrial opportunities spread across Manitoba that we can share.”
Meanwhile, in Thompson, Gibson said the NWDC will continue to facilitate training programs that support the northern industrial economy, like a heavy equipment operator program, Class 1 truck driving courses and a drill simulator program starting in February.
“We’ve hit over 250 people with different types of training and we don’t see any reason why we won’t be much higher than that in the next quarter moving forward,” he said. “It’s not an engineering four-year degree, but … we can rapidly start moving things around now that we are set up.”
For more information on the NWDC, including its sister centre in Swan River, please contact Gibson at tgibson@ucn.ca.
