The CWB Association Welding Podcast
The CWB Association Welding Podcast
Episode 220 with Sarah Thorne and Max Ceron
The CWB Association had the privilege to attend the Skills Canada New Brunswick Provincial Competition in Saint John, NB. Join us as we bring you special episodes recorded in person to advocate for careers in skilled trades and technology across the country.
Discover the thriving welding industry in Atlantic Canada as we sit down with Sarah Thorne, a Welding Instructor at New Brunswick Community College. From her rapid journey to earning her Red Seal certification to her transition into teaching, Sarah debunks the myth that the Maritimes lack opportunities for welders. We explored the persistent challenges women face in welding. With women representing just 4% of the workforce, Sarah explains that the real issue isn't recruitment but retention. Drawing from personal experience, she discusses how she builds confidence in her female students, preparing them to navigate sometimes unwelcoming work environments while proving their technical abilities.
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All right, I can check. Check, I'm good. So I'm Max Duran. Max Duran, cwb Association Welding Podcast. Pod pod podcast. Today we have a really cool guest welding podcast. The show is about to begin.
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Speaker 1:Hello and welcome to another edition of the CWB Association podcast. My name is Max Saron and we are here in beautiful New Brunswick at St John. This is NBCC. We're a part of Atlantic Skills competition here happening this week, which is going to be fantastic. As you know, we are a national sponsor for Skills Canada and also a provincial sponsor for many of the provinces across Canada. Today we are going to be talking to a number of people over the next couple days from the college here of a variety of different trades, and our first guest of the week is Sarah Thorne here, who's an instructor at the college. How are you doing? Are you doing good? And you know, like when you start with this process of skills, how nervous do you get coming up to this week awesome, so how long you been teaching here, okay yeah, awesome.
Speaker 2:So how long have you been teaching here? Okay?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and do you miss the Welder Fab, because apprenticeship is kind of a different game right. Shorter time, kind of in and out, right yeah.
Speaker 2:I like the apprenticeship and out right Right.
Speaker 1:They got a goal right. So what about your career? How did you get into welding in the beginning, Sarah, you know, I don't know. Are you a local here? Are you from New Brunswick? Okay, and in your family was there trades going around. Okay, my dad was a boilermaker. I feel the vibe.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, like a special program out here. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:Cool, Cool and that was that. So, first of all, why the trades at all? You know, what was it that made you? You know, even look at Millwright or industrial mechanic in high school. What was it that attracted you to it? Yeah, yeah. And then, when you, got into it.
Speaker 2:You know why didn't you stick with Millwright? What was it that pulled you into welding and pulled you away from Millwright? He didn't want that, yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean, it doesn't sound awesome to work at a fish plant.
Speaker 1:But no diss to the fish plant, it's probably a great job, yeah yeah and then once you made that switch to welding, you know, were you confident that that's the path you wanted to go through. You know, especially once you're done high school and you gotta, you gotta really crack it into now the apprenticeship and building those hours, you know now where did you go to school for your welding? In Moncton, kind of jump ahead, awesome, awesome. That's like a very fast track. I mean, that's not normally how quick people do it. I'm the word. I wasn't a red seal till, almost Like I mean, I just welded and didn't really think about it. What was it that really helped you focus on this apprenticeship stream? Because you know you don't need a Red Seal right, you don't have to have it, especially when you're working just like out in the shops or you're not a union. What was it that made you really want to get?
Speaker 2:that red seal and have that ticket.
Speaker 1:Okay, yeah, mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, one of the things we hear in canada about the maritimes often it gets repeated all the time is that there isn't enough work out here. You know I live in western canada. We have historically had the influx of people from the maritimes come every summer for the shutdowns. You know I've worked with many people from maritimes over the summers in Western Canada. Is that true? Do you feel like there's not enough work here? Have you had success with work? You know, like, for the people that listen to the podcast from around the world, is it somewhere you can move to with a welding career and establish yourself? Well, at the end of the day, that's the truth. Like I always say, if you've ever seen an unemployed welder, he's not a good welder. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Government job or government job? What are you gonna do?
Speaker 3:right you Right, mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, I did see the refinery. Actually I asked my taxi driver I was like, is that a refinery? And he said yeah, and I said I worked in the refinery when I was younger. Regina's got a refinery too, but in Regina we do kerosene and light fuels and I asked if the what kind of fuels they did here and he had no idea. So I say at home, really now, as a welder, did you ever get the urge to travel? Because so many of us welders do pull that card right because we can, we can right yeah you know it's.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because I had my first kid around 21 too, and and then I, as a welder, I was able to find work around town and you know there was always work around. But as soon as that kids got older, I was like you know, now I get to travel, now I get to do this stuff. Yeah, now, in terms of your welding career, well, you know, you brought up maritime maintenance. What are the big hitters out here? There's a refinery. I see that Obviously, the ocean is a refinery. I see that obviously the ocean's going to provide work, because nothing in the ocean survives long, right, everything gets worn down. It's endless maintenance, right. What are the kind of jobs out here that would be like the biggest ones?
Speaker 3:you know?
Speaker 1:you know? What about mines? Is any mines out here? Never hear much about mining. No, oh, you think that'd be huge now. Tongue-stint's so rare. Yeah, I'm plugging us here. Show's over. So you're welding, you're happy with your career, everything's going great. What pulled you into this world of teaching? You just saw an ad in the paper. Teacher wanted, or did you know somebody? Or which instructor? Oh, I know John very well. Yeah, he is.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Yeah, the East Coast. You know NSCC, nbcc, out here. I've noticed that they really have amazing welding programs. There's a lot of success stories. Even the smaller satellite colleges seem to be running a lot of great programs both in French and English. And it always kind of surprises me because I don't feel like they really get the recognition that they deserve Right, because every time I'm out here I'm amazed at the programs, the colleges, the equipment. You know there's all the programs there's. You know, engineering technologists programs, the wet programs. There's a welder fab, there's straight welder, there's apprenticeship, all of it's here. And you know, not all the provinces can say that. You know, not all the provinces have all these programs. And yet you always hear about Ontario, you always hear about Alberta.
Speaker 1:You don't get the you know the Atlantic provinces in that same conversation. Why do you think yeah, like? Have you noticed that? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm yeah.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, are you guys full Like is it like the program, like wait-listed?
Speaker 1:You can handle well, you can always take over carpentry, right? We don't need a carpenter. Yeah, whatever, if you can build it out of wood, you can build it out of steel, so let's just do that. Yeah, yeah, no, that's why I hate wood. It's not, it's not. Can build it out of steel, so let's just do that. Yeah, yeah, no, that's why I hate wood. It's not a thing. It's like for babies. Sorry, I shouldn't say that. Now, you know how long have you been teaching here?
Speaker 3:now Two years, and in those two years, what have you learned as a teacher?
Speaker 1:Yeah, oh yeah, hmm, what's your favorite thing to teach? We were just talking about that. You guys only have one TIG machine. Well, we got both. Yeah, yeah, okay, good, yeah, all high-frequency.
Speaker 1:TIG so to all the welding suppliers out there that want to make a great donation, you know, and nbcc could really use a lot of high frequency tig machines just saying, yeah, hey, you got a manifesto right. Yeah, manifest it right. Yeah, yeah, now why TIG? Like, I mean, it's the welding. And I'm just being a jerk right now because you ask anybody what's their favorite TIG, tig, tig, tig. And how much work is there out there for TIG? Not that much, right, and every kid gets this idea that I want to be the best TIG welder Instagram. You know the social media, but in reality.
Speaker 3:you know which is the one that's going to be the most useful for students, say, in level one or level two, right, yeah, no.
Speaker 1:Yeah, mm-hmm yeah, it is yeah, yeah, is it what you're best at? Can you really? Can you show off like? Are you like, can you? Can you do all the fancy stuff? Can you do the cup walking? Oh, yeah, now, do you ever compete with your students?
Speaker 1:Welding is a competitive trade right, just by nature, number one we're. We're so highly invigilated, right, there's no way around it. If you're not really trying to maintain that competitive status, even in just internally, I find that you kind of suffer, right, a lot of the best welders and I want to get into this kind of in the second half when we get to talking about skills but some of the best welders I've ever come across have some innate competitiveness to them and often they're like in hockey or race motorcycles or something. They got something on the side that they use to let off this steam, right, what's your hobby? What's the thing that you like to do outside of welding? That's competitive, like I mean, you push yourself to strive, right. Yeah, you love it. Yeah, yeah, go out there and pop some wheelies for a while. Yeah, that's all right. Yeah, it is. I mean, as long as you don't get caught by the tire on the way down, you're good.
Speaker 3:Do you?
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm, were you always artistic? Was this just part of your background? Yeah, always artistic, was this just part of your background? Yeah, that's one of the things that I think has become very popular now in the welding spectrum is welded art, and I think in the past it was kind of looked down upon of like oh, that's not real welding right. Like I mean, you got to be a structural welder, a a pipe welder, industrial welder, in order to be considered a welder or have a chance at making money for a career. But I think in the last few years we've kind of seen that Like I mean, like all arts, if you build it, someone will buy it. Right, and that's just. That's the thing about art is if you have the confidence to build it and make it and not compare yourself to other artists, cause that's a, that's a hole that you don't want to go down because you'll you'll ruin your confidence right away.
Speaker 1:But you know, if you can build it and make it and put it out there, people will buy it and we're seeing that there's, you know, there's people that are very, very, you know, successful as artists now in the welding world. Would you, or do your students, feel like you know, like that this is an actual career now? Like is it something you say like, hey, you can go be a ship builder or a or an artist, right? Like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I've met Chenen. She's awesome, yeah, yeah yeah yeah, she's done stuff. I think we have something of hers in our in our head office but yeah, no, she's been around.
Speaker 1:She does stuff with in theS too, aws and a whole bunch of other stuff too. So now, on that note, you know for yourself as a female artist, welder teacher, you know you said you had Jen on your Instagram a long time ago how important is that female-led community for you. And you know, as a welder coming up, how important was that.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Do you feel that we're starting to make a dent, like in, in, in the representation? Cause it's, it's brutal. There's a new show out called the 4% right now which is, uh, talking about how women are only 4% of the industry, right, and, and I mean that's embarrassingly low. It's worse than other trades. It is worse than other trades and, to be honest, I couldn't tell you why, because I'm only ever been in one trade. I don't know how it rolls with the electricians or plumbers or whatever, but for some reason we've had that inability to A recruit women. But I would say that's not the biggest issue.
Speaker 1:I would say the biggest is retention, right, because as an instructor, I taught in the college for almost 10 years. I had lots of women students, lots, and there was classes where I would be 50-50 if not. There was one class where I had eight women and four guys right, which I was like like wow, this is awesome, lots of girls, you know, um, but then the statistics don't hold well right, like you're looking at, you know, two years down the road, I think it's less than 20 percent are still in the trades. What are we doing wrong? What's? What are we missing? Like, what, what's? What's the problem? Yeah, what's?
Speaker 3:the problem. Yeah, mm-hmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah, f off yeah.
Speaker 3:Mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, yeah how do you try to prepare them, as a female teacher to female students to stay? You know? What can you do to help them to fix that retention issue? Awesome, well, this is a good time to take our commercial break. We'll be back in just a couple seconds here after our advertisers talk.
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Speaker 1:And we are back here on the CWB Association podcast. My name is Max Duran and I'm here with Sarah Thorne from NBCC. All right, right before the break, we were talking about, you know, supporting women in the industries and yourself, as a female instructor, trying to do what we can to tackle some of the retention issues we have with women in the industries, and one of the key points that you brought up a couple of times was confidence. Right and right now, this week we are having skills competition across the Atlantic provinces. You have a number of provinces here representing and fighting for those last spots to compete for nationals, and it's a year, a qualifying year, to go to Shanghai, china. How important is these type of competitions, you know, in the welding community, for your students to build those, you know, confidences.
Speaker 3:Bye, bye, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Did you try skills when you were a student? It was very common Very common.
Speaker 2:I was the only one that had it.
Speaker 1:Mm-hmm now just the first time they've had one of these big like atlantic competitions. Um, because you know I've been well, I've been here, out here for nationals in 2019 and I'm just trying to think if there was other, you know, kind of combined events or big events like this I don't think so yeah how do you feel about your students as you're competing?
Speaker 2:yeah, yeah, you think they got it.
Speaker 1:You think how many competitors you have today? Going in total between all of them, there's 12 got hurt and is there post-secondary and secondary happening out here?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:High school kids tomorrow. Those are always so fun to watch, they're so nervous. Yeah, I remember being a teacher during a skills journey and it's really interesting because I always think back, because you know the kid. I went to skills with Adam Sebastian. We, we ended up going to Russia Me. There was a co-mentorship. We had two mentor instructors. It's the way SAS Poly always does it two instructors. We find it gives a little bit of a competitive edge to the student because they can I can bounce off ideas off two people Right.
Speaker 1:But he wasn't our first pick and we always talk about that, you know, after the fact, as instructors, when we did our internal competitions because you do your little in-school competitions to kind of filter out who's the best and right he was maybe in our top five right.
Speaker 1:And then when we got to the last competition before provincialss, he was top three, barely right. Top three, not because he wasn't a great welder, but he was kind of like slow, like just like his timing wasn't quite there and he was kind of struggling to finish things on time. But then when it came down to having to pick you know, know, well, we can only send two, one in an alternate we ended up picking Adam for a couple of reasons. One, that slowness we felt we could work on, but it was an attention to detail that made him slow, which I'm okay with, right, I'm okay with attention to detail if I can speed that up. And then the other piece is that he was a professional motocross competitor and we knew that that would translate, because if you're used to competing, you're used to being up on a stage, you're used to the pressure that would be important and you know it really did pay off. He got pretty far. Now, when you look at your students, you know, how do you start to filter them down?
Speaker 1:How was the judging process here at your college? What about the ones that you want to compete but don't want to? Because there's always a few of those, yeah, yeah come on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how do you find the uptake guys on it? Like you know, 12 students.
Speaker 1:Come on, yeah, how do you find the uptake guys on it, like you know, 12 students. Do you make all 12 compete the first round, just because they should all see what it's like, or do you make it completely voluntary right from the start? Yeah, I think we tried one year. Just, everyone try, you know, and if you don't, you don't whatever, just to make it, even because sometimes somebody doesn't want to. But then they try it and they're actually really good, right, and then, cause, often it's just a confidence issue, right, we keep getting back to that confidence and for welding, confidence doesn't grow without practice. Really, it's just. It's just that repetition, right, you're like don't look at me, yeah, yeah, especially in front of somebody.
Speaker 1:Yeah, is there places like you said you worked out here, and there was only one female in the one shop that you worked at. Are you the only female instructor here at NBCC for welding? Yeah, so the under-representation continues. Right Now there's some big shops out here, right, like you got Irving, there's some big, big companies out here and I see that they're like making attempts at like really trying to hire a lot of women, the girls in your classes that are going through the programs now. Do you think they're going to have any trouble finding work? Do you think that they're going to have more opportunities than, say, 10 years ago, when you were going through?
Speaker 1:that's good, yeah, now you said local 213 a few times big union. Out here, the one of the bigger supporters, yeah, that's pipe fitters. Yeah, okay, so do you think they got a chance? Yeah, everybody out there. Yeah, now, how much work is there for 213, like you know, as it has the hall been really supportive of the program here and and and the students yeah yeah, well, like you said, you're waitlisted.
Speaker 1:so, like, if people are looking to get into the programs out here, apply early and often right, yeah, now, in terms of the skills competition, you know how's the local industry supporting you guys? You know the suppliers, the other local businesses. Have you guys got a lot of support from the people around the St John area? I've seen Miller Machines everywhere out there. Source Atlantic, I think, is out here supporting Lawn Nice. Well, we need industry to step up, right, because at at the end of the day, we all need your students too, like, I mean those like we've really learned.
Speaker 1:Industry has learned that welders don't like to buy from people that don't know welding, right. So you see, like lots of the companies, like messer and lindy, source atlantic salespersons are almost all ex-welders. Now, right, yeah, because it's hard to be like, hey, I need a 035 contact for this Tragaskas gun. And they're like why the new Tragaskas? Or the old Tragaskas that used to be Bernard? Remember the old Bernard that used to be Tragaskas, but now it's Tragaskis, or the old Tregaskis that used to be Bernard? Remember the old Bernard that used to be Tregaskis?
Speaker 4:but now it's Tregaskis, that one.
Speaker 1:Okay, gotcha, gotcha. So what's in the future for you? Now? You know, like you're young I'd put you at late 20s I have no idea how old, you are right. So you got a kid, you got a family. You're you got a family. You're already teaching, which is extremely young to start teaching Like, some of us took forever to get a teaching job, Some of us not. So what's in your future? Do you see yourself here for the next 30 years?
Speaker 2:You know when I say it like that it doesn't sound so good.
Speaker 3:Yeah, mm-hmm.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, oh yeah, I shouldn't have made fun of carpentry then earlier. I'm sorry. Now what's?
Speaker 1:next, yeah, yeah well, it happens, it happens. I mean I've had the same question asked to me but and I've bounced right, so I got my welder and then I got my fab and then I got my blue seal right. Yeah, yeah, it's a lot more math, a lot more heady, which I enjoyed, right, like. I don't mind the books and I love math. And learning new ways to do math was, I thought, really fun. Right, because you have like the math you do every day and then you have like real math, like trigonometry. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, okay, it's new. Yeah, yeah, yeah, like. So one of the common things to go to after teaching is into some type of, you know, management type of gig would you ever like to be like? Do you see yourself as a shop manager, owner, anything like that? Like?
Speaker 1:yeah, yeah, yeah okay, yeah, you could always do that on the side. That's a beautiful thing about teaching, you know, because I had my side business. I had, like I had my own shop, and then when I started teaching, I kind of pushed it off to the side, got rid of everything, but I still kept the num, like the company name and gst number and everything, so that I could always just do those side hustles off the side. Because, number one, you have summers off, right. So instead of going to go do shutdowns and stuff, I would just pick up a couple contracts and build stuff over the summer, right? I mean that that that's always something nice. And then I mean you could always come work at cwb because, like I mean, sometimes this place comes knocking, it's hard to say no, so awesome. Well, thank you so much.
Speaker 1:This has been a fantastic interview. Is there anything you'd like to say to the people about you know skills in general or the welding program out here? Yeah, no, better time like the present, awesome. Well, thank you very much, sarah. This has been super fun and I hope your two students get to, uh, the finals and I hope I see you in regina for the national competition. Awesome, we'll get back to work out there you take care, and for everyone downloading and listening. Thanks so much for being a part of the podcast. We're going to have a number of them recorded here in in in St John, new Brunswick, new Brunswick, and uh, sorry, early morning. Yeah, words are hard today, but uh, yeah, check them all out.
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