The gold standard
Maitland auto body painter earns top prize at Skills Canada competition
There may always be detractors. But, from now on, every time Nicole Hamilton steps into a paint booth, she will do so with a sense of gold-tinged, self-assurance.
Hamilton, 24, of Maitland, recently returned with a gold medal in postsecondary auto body painting from the Skills Canada competitions in Edmonton.
“For me, it gives me more confidence,” she said. “I know I can do it but I wanted that certification type of thing.”
Hamilton was one of three females out of eight competitors who participated in the post-secondary spray off. She claimed gold while a female competitor from New Brunswick came away with silver and another woman from Ontario took the bronze medal.
“It was exciting. I don’t even know how excited I was,” she said. “They said Ontario and then New Brunswick and then all I remember hearing was ‘Nova …’ and I jumped up and jumped across six chairs and ran …”
For her proud mother, Kim Hamilton of South Branch, near Stewiacke, Nicole’s gold-medal win doesn’t really come as a surprise, knowing her daughter’s determination when she sets her mind to something.
“She’s done very well for herself. I think she’s a good little painter. She’s very dedicated and she loves her job, she loves to paint cars,” Kim said.
“Not what I anticipated for her as a career when she was growing up, at all,” she added.
“She’s such a small little thing, I never dreamt of her wanting to paint cars or rip them apart. Like there’s a lot of physical work involved, right? Anyways, I just figured she would do more girly stuff, I guess.”
While growing up, Nicole had envisioned herself getting involved with video game art and design.
While trying to figure out a career direction during her Options and Opportunities course in high school, however, her teacher wasn’t able to find a placement in that category for the job shadow aspect of the program.
“In high school, I was a very academic person,” she said. “I didn’t want to leave any doors shut.”
Her course load included advanced English, calculus and, of course, art.
“One day my teacher said, ‘well you are good at math, why not go into something like engineering?’ And I was like, why don’t I just paint cars?”
And the rest, as they say, is history. After graduating from high school Nicole enrolled in a two-year, auto body metal and paint course at the NSCC, Akerley Campus in Dartmouth.
She currently works as a painter in a shop in Sackville.
This was her fifth and final year participating in the Skills Canada competition and the first medal placement after claiming a silver medal at the provincial level during her first year.
And it is just the kind of reinforcement Nicole said she wanted to carry forward in her career.
“I hope that it encourages more people to compete at Skills. Not just females but everybody. I walk into a lot of shops and people already know who I am through skills and that is something that I can’t do without competing,” she said.
“I never thought people would know me without even meeting them kind of thing. But just the coverage that I’ve gotten, that says a lot to me.”
Despite being a female in a traditionally male-dominated trade, Nicole is seeing some improvement in the numbers who openly welcome her into their fold. But the detractors are still there, too.
“Some people are very welcoming, having me there as a new tech. A very select few have been very supportive and they know who they are,” she said. “And others are like: ‘OK, let’s see what she can do’ and then they throw everything at me. And it’s never good enough no matter how well I do. So, if I don’t stick it out then they can just be like, ‘oh yeah, we drove her out of the trade.’
“And that’s not happening.”