Wanted: Skilled Marine Mechanics to Keep Up With Demand

Foundations program could help solve the issue

Just like automobiles, boats require regular servicing: a tune-up twice a year, for starters, and the occasional repair, with more care needed as the vessels age.

But the massive growth of the recreational boating industry has led to a shortage of skilled marine mechanics; and with no end of growth in sight, dealers, marinas, and boatyards are increasingly in need of trained mechanical technicians.

Unfortunately, when the new Marine Mechanical Technician Apprenticeship Program (MMT) was launched at BCIT in 2014 to replace the obsolete Inboard/ Outboard Foundation-apprenticeship program operated by Vancouver Island University ( VIU) and BCIT, and the Foundation program was dissolved soon after.

Glynis Steen, Dean, Trades and Applied Technology for VIU, points out: “This leaves the boating sector in a precarious position. Virtually every other trade has a Foundation-apprenticeship program structure: the former takes raw talent and trains them so they can secure employment and provide instant value, and the latter takes these new employees and develops their skill sets.”

To which Lisa Geddes, Executive Director of Boating BC, adds: “It's extremely difficult for the small regional businesses to invest in untrained mechanics and then put them through Apprenticeship. In B.C. only 16 students complete the

classroom portion of the MMT program yearly, which is a small number and illustrates the need for a Foundations program that would increase the volume of people in this line of work.”

Brendan Keys of GA Checkpoint Yamaha agrees. “My business is unique in that we also sell motorcycles and ATVS, so I already had staff who came through that Foundation program that I could apprentice,” he says. “Small dealers are facing a real service problem, which intensifies at the beginning and end of the boating season when boat owners show up in droves to have their vessels checked out.”

Boating BC, BCIT, and VIU are trying to rectify a number of administrative issues pertaining to the need for a Foundation. Namely, they are encouraging the formal distinction between the needs of the recreational boating industry with those of the industrial marine sector; and they are working directly with the Industry Training Authority (ITA) to make a case for a Foundation program to be developed and offered at VIU on the Island and at BCIT in the Lower Mainland.

“Ironically, before the original Foundation was dissolved we received federal and provincial funding to build a new marine, automotive and trades facility on campus, which would have housed this program, among others.”

Steen is cautiously optimistic that a Foundation will be re-established sooner than later. “I think we're making good progress with the ITA, and we have an existing program that can be enhanced in order to transform it into a Foundation program,” she says.

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