School of Construction Management and Trades

CHRISTOPHER COURT: I like the ability to work on different projects. I've worked for two consulting companies. I'm now working for Tridel, so I've had the wide range experience of working on all different types of sectors in construction.   PATRICIA ALDERSON: I think it's a family thing. I have an aunt and uncle down in Florida who are in construction and they talked to me about project manager. I found the program and it was something that I thought I could do.   CHRISTOPHER COURT: Our newest job that we are marketing right now, which is the 10 York site, that's proposed to be anywhere from 70 to 75-story condo tower. For Tridel, that's the highest building that we're going to have built to this point.   My duties mainly include doing the pricing of the estimates, doing the high-end stuff.    PATRICIA ALDERSON: I walk around with friends around Toronto and I'll be like, "Yeah, I worked on, I worked on that building. I did just a little bit of it, but that's my work and that's what I did." And well, it's just a good feeling.   CHRISTOPHER COURT: Dealing with Tridel and dealing with the trades, there's a lot of communication between recent grads and the school and of course, them always trying to improve their programs.    So with having a lot of the professors having a background knowledge in construction, they're passing that down onto us.    PATRICIA ALDERSON: A lot of our courses are geared right towards what the industry wants, so we're doing estimating the way that the companies want us to do estimating. We're learning about health and safety in the same way you would in orientation.   On my job, I have to look at contracts all the time and one of my courses that I had was all about contracts. So being able to place that directly into my work and being like, "Wow, I actually do need to know this and that's actually something I'm going to use," is a really good thing.   TOM STEPHENSON: We have great industry partnerships and our philosophy is that we need to have those partnerships and it's a win, win, win situation.   The College wins because we have great graduates. Employers win because they hire the graduates, their businesses grow. And we win because we get an excellent reputation in the industry.   BRUNO GIANCOLA: A strong attitude and a willingness to learn is very important to us and we find that in a lot of the George Brown students that we've hired. They come with a very strong work ethic, their ability to learn quickly. They've learned a lot of technical issues at school that help them in grasping and understanding what we're teaching them on a day-to-day basis.    And their attitude allows them to work hard in our environment and their educational background helps them to grasp the new things that we teach them a lot quicker.    PATRICIA ALDERSON: For me, I've evolved a lot. I was right out of high school, I was 17, and a lot of people have this stigma about having young people in construction. A lot of the students were really welcoming and the teachers all were great and over the past four years, it's all really come together.