New First Nation campaign to promote skilled trades as first-choice careers underway

By Colin Graf

LONDON— First Nations students will soon be seeing and hearing familiar faces and voices when they go looking for what they want to do or become after high school— but maybe not the faces and voices post-secondary opportunity-seekers have often seen before.

If what they see and hear inspires them, well then, that is the whole point of a new campaign to attract students into the skilled trades. The “role-model” campaign, which will feature eight First Nation workers in short videos and on posters, is “to promote these well-paid careers as important as they actually are,” says Bill Couchie, FNMI program manager for Skills Ontario, a mostly industry-funded organization with the goal Couchie describes as promoting skilled trades as “viable first-choice careers.”

The videos in the new campaign highlighting trades and tech workers will have an interview format, Couchie says, and the role-models will tell why and how they got into their career, what they like about their work, and what challenges they faced, Couchie explains.

He hopes young people or underemployed people will see the campaign posters in high school or college guidance or recruitment offices, or in First Nations’ employment offices, and will view the videos on social media feeds of web sites serving similar functions.

“Maybe they’ve gone through similar struggles, maybe they can identify with that person,” Couchie hopes.

With a “huge” shortage of workers in the trades in Ontario, there are plenty of opportunities for employment, as long as employment or career counsellors such as Couchie can “dispel the notion that if you do bad in high school, you can just do a trade,” he says.

“We don’t want that kind of image, we want the image that you have to be smart, have to be good at what you are doing— you have to go to school.”

Hoping to eliminate stereotypes, Couchie says a trades career is “just as important as going to college or university.”

After advertising last fall for people to be one of the First Nation role models, Skills Ontario received close to 20 applications for the eight slots before the end of Dec.

“We had a lot of people who reached out about how interested they were and how they wanted to be a part of this,” Couchie says.

The applications came from across Ontario, including Thunder Bay, Sudbury, Sault Ste. Marie, Toronto, Kitchener, Chatham, and Ottawa, from both men and women. A film production company will take photos and do interviews with the successful candidates. Late March is a “soft deadline” for finishing about half the two to three minute videos, Couchie says. Some of the role models have really great stories, he says, and particularly impressive are two women who have been very successful in their line of work, with “lots of responsibility in really important jobs.”

Travelling from his office at Fanshawe College in London, Couchie usually spends much of his time doing high school presentations, and he hopes to incorporate the new videos in those. Since the arrival of COVID-19, Couchie’s presentations are online and often working through high school co-op offices, he says.

The First Nation role-model campaign originated with Marnie Yourchuk, education manager for Mamaweswen, the North Shore Tribal Council. Seeking help to bring life to the idea, Yourchuk approached Couchie at Skills Ontario, along with others at Mamaweswen and ONECA, the Ontario Native Education Counselling Association.

The Tribal Council represents seven First Nations, Atikameksheng Anishnawbek, Batchewana, Garden River, Thessalon, Mississauga #8, Serpent River, and Sagamok Anishnawbek.

Since many First Nations have a housing shortage, encouraging young community members to enter the trades is “a natural progression,” she says. With many different trades needed in home construction, training and employing “our own people” only makes sense, Yourchuk explains.

She began to think about a lack of First Nation role-models after noticing last fall that a handbook on skilled trades seemed to have “a gap in service. I didn’t see a lot of Indigenous people in there,” Yourchuk recalls.

Her “ultimate goal” is to expand the range and number of role-models in the poster and video campaign so that every trade and career is represented. When the call went out for people who want to be role-models in the trades, applications came from people in other jobs such as nursing, so extending the project would not be difficult and “would surely be worthwhile,” Yourchuk says.