A farm team for future tech talent
Pembina Trails Early College has high school students coding at university levels
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Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/11/2019 (1595 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
At just 15, Kaden Spletzer is on his way to becoming a cybersecurity expert, thanks to a new program that’s developing high school students today for the IT jobs of tomorrow.
“I find networking and protecting data really cool,” said Kaden, who is one of 29 Grade 10 students attending Pembina Trails Early College (PTEC) and becoming tech savvy and job ready. He attends Shaftesbury High School for half a day, then studies information technology at the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology on Innovation Drive for the other half.
“We have to make sure these kids are ready,” said Jane Barchart, the PTEC principal. Students have to choose one of two streams — cyberdefence and cloud administration or software development — but their career options are unlimited, she said.
“As much as this is a tech school, tech is everywhere,” Barchart said. “One of our students said he’s getting into medicine to be a doctor because he knows robots and machine learning in medicine are the next thing.”
More than 33,000 Manitobans are expected to be employed in the tech sector by 2021. Employers can go “shopping” elsewhere for skilled workers or start them here “from scratch,” which is what PTEC is doing, Tech Manitoba CEO Kathy Knight said.
“Who says focused professional-level training can only begin after high school?” Knight said. “PTEC ignites our learners passions and elevates their competitiveness.”
It took six years for Tech Manitoba, the Pembina Trails School Division and the Manitoba Institute of Trades and Technology (MITT) to get the program up and running, said Knight, who championed it from the start.
It starts in Grade 9 with Pembina Trails students getting half-day classes at PTEC on Innovation Drive, with mentorship from visiting industry partners.
In Grade 10, the classes continue, with students visiting IT mentors where they work. In Grade 11, they’ll advance to a work placement to get experience and, in Grade 12, they’ll get an internship.
“Our goal is to build a network of five PTEC schools with 500 students,” said Knight, who credited IBM with creating a playbook for preparing high school students for in-demand jobs in information technology. The first cohort of 29 students in their second year of PTEC shows it’s working, she said.
“Current Grade 10 students are performing at a second-year computer science level,” Knight told a PTEC open house on Friday. “In practical terms, you can think of this program as you would a farm team. Just as the Winnipeg Jets have the Manitoba Moose, industry and post-secondary institutions now have a pathway for new tech talent.”
Kaden, who played video games and dabbled with coding in Grade 8, is now competing in the Cyber Defence Challenge and Cyber Patriot Games, testing his ability to secure operating systems and data.
“I would like to work for the government or some big company in cybersecurity,” he said. For now, Kaden has a part-time job teaching coding to seven to 14 year olds. “I had all these skills and wanted to get a job so I could buy stuff ,” he said. His gig with the Coding Ninjas pays him minimum wage, he said. “Later on, I might get a raise.”
He’s doing what he loves and is no longer bored at school.
“PTEC really makes it fun to go to school,” Kaden said. “Before, I used to dread going to school. There was nothing for me to engage in — there was nothing interesting that they were teaching.”
If it wasn’t for PTEC, he’d be in much less challenging computer science classes at Shaftesbury, he said.
“We’re developing websites and they’re doing the basics,” Kaden said.
The program — which has close to 30 industry partners and mentors, including Bold Commerce, Skip the Dishes and Ubisoft — is in its early stages with room to grow, principal Barchart said.
“We want to make sure students all around Winnipeg and Manitoba have an opportunity to do what we’re doing because it is really amazing,” she said.
“PTEC will shape the future of education in Manitoba,” said Mark Derro, the vice-president of academics at MITT. Students get a chance to acquire and apply skills in a variety of tech applications while learning in environments that follow industry standards and use industry-leading hardware and software, Derro said. At the same time, he said, they’re earning high school and college credits concurrently.
“This approach integrates what’s happening in the workplace,” he said. “It sees curriculum updates on a continual basis and embeds the rigour and realities of working in the technology sector.”
carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca
Twitter: @wfpcarolsanders
Carol Sanders
Legislature reporter
After 20 years of reporting on the growing diversity of people calling Manitoba home, Carol moved to the legislature bureau in early 2020.