Serving up skills

George Brown College president Anne Sado is cooking up some new ideas about education and its role in meeting the needs of industry

Dec. 11, 2005. 07:51 PM
by JUDY STEED
STAFF REPORTER

STEVE RUSSELL/TORONTO STAR
George Brown College president Anne Sado holds up an entrée in the kitchen of a restaurant run by the college's hospitality school.

What do you say about a young woman so not intimidated by men - she was one of a few females among 500 U of T engineering students back in the unruly 1970s - that she was elected president of her graduating class.

And treasurer of the engineering society.

But if anyone was surprised by the trajectory of Anne Sado's career, she is not.

In the office of the president of George Brown College - probably the most diverse institution in the country, with 14,000 full-time (including 1,400 international students from 95 countries) and 55,000 part-time students - Sado communicates an unabashed passion for the business of education, and for education that meets the practical needs of industry and students.

Perhaps her greatest pride is that close to 90 per cent of George Brown graduates get jobs - and their faces, as we walk the halls of the college, are the faces of the country's economic future.

"This is applied education," she says. "It's about making sure our students learn skills that are needed. We're driven by industry. Industry needs more graduates and it's our job to produce them."

The Toronto Construction Association is so hungry for skilled workers it provided $2,500 scholarships (which covered most of the tuition fee) for 38 students last September to launch a new bachelor's degree in construction management - a course that was developed in conjunction with industry and was so successful that TCA scholarships will likely be available again next fall for some students.

Over the past two years, Mattamy Homes paid the college $250,000 to develop a program to upgrade its employees; at the same time, two dozen George Brown students were selected for the Mattamy Certificate program and guaranteed summer jobs at Mattamy Homes.

Sado is a practical president. Just back from an Ontario trade mission to China, led by Premier Dalton McGuinty, she's eager to talk about recruiting Chinese students and linking the college's Early Childhood Education program with a Chinese pre-school where George Brown students can do part of their training. (International students pay $11,000 a year; for Canadians, the average yearly tuition is about $4,000 for two- or three-year programs.)

We walk past various "living labs," which ensure that all students spend up to half of their college time getting hands-on experience. There's a full assembly line, donated by Siemens Canada and updated by the company every few years, "so students can work with state-of-the-art equipment" as they manufacture circuit boards.

Siemens sells its equipment to Research in Motion Ltd. in Waterloo, which is assured a supply of graduates skilled at working on Siemens' circuit board system. Siemens also uses its George Brown setup to demonstrate the company's assembly line to other customers.

"So it's part of good corporate citizenship, giving us the equipment, and good business sense," Sado says.

Similarly, Sobey's paid for a Food Development Centre run by professional staff, with students learning to be creative in "real world" product development for Sobey's "Our Compliments" brands. In fact, the college partners with 1,300 corporations and organizations ranging from BMO Nesbitt Burns to the Hudson's Bay Co., the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Celestica Inc. and the Hospital for Sick Children.

We're on our way to lunch at Siegfried's, the restaurant run by George Brown's famous Hospitality School. Its chef's school is rated one of the Top 10 in North America. It is located just across Adelaide St. East from the main St. James campus at 200 King St. East. (Established in 1967 by then-education minister Bill Davis, later the premier, who set up a province-wide system of community colleges, George Brown has two other downtown sites, at Casa Loma and at 99 Gerrard St. East.)

This is applied education. It's about making sure our students learn skills that are needed ... Industry needs more graduates and it's our job to produce them."

Anne Sado, president,

George Brown College

Siegfried's hums with energy. "It's a real working environment," Sado notes. "It's open for lunch and dinner and booked for special events - tonight there's a marketing event for the Canadian Hearing Society - and it makes a small profit that goes back into the operation."

Sado's conversation - like her life - reflects the extraordinary range of bases she's touched. Before we can order our meal, she talks about apprenticeship programs that train 1,800 a year in skilled trades - electrician, plumber, refrigeration and air conditioning, sheet metal worker and steamfitter, carpenter and industrial mechanic/millwright. These are fields that many people know little about, but are nonetheless well compensated. ("It's difficult to find a steamfitter who doesn't make $100,000 a year," says Rolf Priesnitz, chair of George Brown's apprenticeship programs.)

One of the college's new pre-apprenticeship programs involves Woodgreen Community Centre and Regent Park residents. Twenty-five "youth at risk" will take 10 weeks of carpentry framing and will be eligible to work on the redevelopment of Regent Park, giving them "a leg up," as Sado puts it, to forge a future for themselves.

That's what this is all about.

Our server at Siegfried's, Stephanie, hovers attentively. Sado quizzes her: How did Stephanie find out about the Hospitality School? (A high school guidance counsellor.) What does Stephanie want to do in life? (Open a restaurant or club.) Sado is pleased. She loves the students' ambitions, their entrepreneurial energy.

She orders baby arugula and frisee salad with sundried cranberry vinaigrette, sliced pears and spicy caramelized pecans. Her entrZe is Oliver's Lamb Korma with Indian saffron rice, nan bread and cucumber and mint salad. Perrier to drink.

Though she aims to get to the gym three times a week, she doesn't usually make it, for obvious reasons. Most days, she works into the evening, attending college events - the gala opening of the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, a new theatre complex in the Distillery District that's shared by the George Brown Theatre School and Soulpepper Theatre Co. Or Jammin' to Jamaica, a fundraiser for ECE students preparing to spend a month at a Jamaican childcare centre that's linked to George Brown. (The college's 8 Toronto daycare centres - among the most respected in the city - function as early childhood education "lab schools.")

And she has a communications strategy that keeps her busy. Last week, she held "town hall" lunch meetings that were packed to the rafters. She explained her business plan and employees asked questions.

On top of the swirl of events, Sado oversees constant curriculum changes. In health sciences - the college has programs for 17 professional roles, from nursing to dental hygiene, orthotics to fitness - the new mantra is collaboration. "To change the way professions function, we have to change the way we teach them (and) ... stop educating in silos."

The college developed a new program, Health Informatics, to teach the management of electronic patient records. "Hospitals tell us they need a centralized system so that doctors can have access to patients' x-rays and other relevant records, online."

Which makes the school a living organism, shifting its priorities as the world around it changes.

As a child, Anne was especially good at maths and sciences. She planned to become a doctor, but hated biology -"I couldn't stand dissecting one poor rat over and over again for weeks" - and switched to engineering. She played hockey and volleyball and got along well with her classmates, but never took her eye off the target.

A Bachelor of Applied Science in industrial engineering from U of T (1977) was followed by an MBA from U of T (1981). In the meantime, she'd joined Bell Canada right out of university and, over the next 25 years, worked her way through every nitty-gritty department, handling traffic order writing, equipment engineering, data installation and network maintenance.

"I had to learn the equipment. When Nortel (Networks Corp.) introduced digital switching, we helped them clarify what was working and what wasn't."

This is applied education. It's about making sure our students learn skills that are needed ... Industry needs more graduates and it's our job to produce them."

Anne Sado,
president of George Brown College

In 1978, she met Ed Sado (also Polish) on a blind date. Married within a year, they have two sons, John Paul (JP), now 20, and Michael, 14. (Ed is a retired geologist who does some teaching and consulting, which enables him to be more active on the home front. Sado's mother is also very close to her grandsons. "I couldn't have done it without her," Anne says.)

At Bell, she rose up through field operations, customer service, business development and business planning, and in 2000 was appointed senior vice-president, business processes and operational effectiveness. She championed new customer service initiatives with significant earnings improvements.

The key to success, she says, is relationships. "That's what you're doing in business or education - and that's what I tell the students. You're building relationships. You never know when the person in your class or the colleague at the next desk may turn up later in life."

As a leader, the central challenge is to "get to know your people, so you can tap into their knowledge and skills and inspire them to work hard to work with you."

It was Sado's friend and former Bell colleague, Carol Stephenson, who became president of the Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in 2003, who alerted Sado to the George Brown job.

Asked why so many strong women leaders came out of Bell, Stephenson (who was also CEO at Lucent Canada), credits Bell with doing a good job of employee development.

"When they saw high potential managers, they gave them lots of opportunities and moved them around a lot. There was an attitude that women could break through into non-traditional jobs."

Having both moved through engineering, marketing and financial positions, Stephenson says she and Sado learned to step quickly into new situations and "hit the ground running. Anne knows how to listen and learn and get the job done."

Appointed president at George Brown in January 2004, Sado was well aware that there would be "a steep learning curve. I have to get to know the people. I have to work to set the vision, inspire the people and fulfil the vision, define the objectives and goals - and I have experience with all that."

She is responsible for an annual budget of $160 million, 1,100 full-time and 800 part-time staff. Grateful for Ontario's May budget, with an infusion of $6.2 billion for post-secondary education, she introduces a caveat: "Ontario has the lowest funding per capita in Canada."

In the meantime, George Brown is growing by leaps and bounds, expanding its student intake by 35 per cent over the past three years.

As we leave, Sado passes by new cooking labs with handsome gas stoves and talks about a planned 20,000-square-foot addition "to accommodate industry demands for more students" in the hospitality industry.

Then there's a new provincial initiative, Colleges Integrating Immigrants to Employment (CIITE), "bridging programs to build on credentials from other countries.

"We're developing more co-op programs, increasing numbers in construction, ECE, community services, nursing, dental hygiene - they all have lab components. We've got an RN program in conjunction with Ryerson University." And she's excited about a new youth apprenticeship program.

Sometimes her husband asks her, with affection, "Can't you stop?" In truth, no. She sleeps maybe five hours a night and is up by 6 a.m. most days.

"I don't like to waste time. There's so much to read, listen to, see, do."

Reproduced with permission - Torstar Syndication Services.

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Revised: December 22, 2005