The College of New Caledonia had some special visitors today (Tuesday), with representatives from the Goldau Vocational Training Centre in Switzerland visiting the College’s Prince George Campus.
This was the first step in a collaborative effort to share knowledge and best practices in vocational training.
“We are a small country, that means our students they come once a week to school, and they work four days in a week in the host company,” explained Stephan Romer, who is responsible for general education at Goldau Vocational Training Centre.
“They have the theory in one day, and then they have the practical work the other four days, therefore they are quite interested to learn because its not a big long part, and there is exchange between theory and practice all week.”
Romer said this is his first visit to Canada, and he says the size of our country may make it harder to take up a similar system in Switzerland.
“We have three locations, learning locations in Switzerland, there is the most important thing, is the host company and then the vocational school, and then we have a third location,” he said.
“The company’s union, they pay for that third location, and our students, our apprentices go three weeks in one year to that location.”
Romer added he was impressed with the equipment in the shops at CNC.
“I have to say, we can improve the equipment a little bit to improve our education,” he said.
Romer said he thinks the biggest benefit could be shared knowledge.
“When we see how you do things and we can take up some ideas of that, we took a lot of pictures, and we have some ideas of how we can improve our education in Goldau,”
“Then we can get the next step to bring some Swiss people, groups of four or five, apprentices to Canada, that they are here for two or three weeks, and then they can learn how they do it in Canada, and be a little bit more open-minded.”
The College of New Caledonia’s Associate Director for International and Student Services Anne Harris shared that sentiment.
“There’s always opportunities to learn from how other people do things,” she said.
“Being able to compare our system with the education system in Switzerland might help inform both of us about maybe looking at some different ways that we can manage our teaching of these important programs.”
Harris said next steps would be looking at ways to develop partnerships for the future, which could include visits to the Goldau campuses in Switzerland, and developing ways to collaborate on teaching ways.
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