By CRM staff
Toronto, Ontario – April 22, 2019 – More than 3,000 people filled the Tradex in Abbotsford, B.C. last Wednesday, for the provincial skills competition.
In total there were about 20 young people competing in the car painting and autobody competition. “It was really nice to see a lot of female competitors,” said director of Skills Canada Collision Repair Program Leanne Jefferies.
Ricky Guan from Vancouver Community College took home the gold medal for the post-secondary auto collision repair competition, and Cowichan Secondary student Ben Miller was the hold place winner in the secondary level. For car painting, Reilly Oulwerling from Elgin Park Secondary won gold in the competition. These winners now have the opportunity to move onto compete at the national level at the Skills Canada competition on May 28 to 29 in Halifax.
Jefferies shared that White and Peters provided, setup and tore down the paint booth for the competition. “Without the booth, we wouldn’t be able to host the competition,” she said. Many other companies provided donations as well.
“A lot of the colleges involved were also key to organizing the event,” she said.
But it wasn’t just the competitions that filled the venue. Jefferies explained, they had a virtual paint booth set up for students to try, and industry brochures to hand out.
According to Jefferies the paint booth attracted several thousand students and allowed them to get hands-on experience in the collision repair field. The paint booth also showed the students their results when they were done, and some of them kept coming back to try it out more than once, Jefferies said.
Part of the reason why they have the Skills Canada Collision Repair Program is to attract students to a potential career path of the collision repair industry, Jefferies confirmed.
