Mohawk College shifting focus to current and future job demands
Mohawk College has suspended the applied music and journalism programs and is focusing on things such as skilled trades, health and human resources and cybersecurity
Say goodbye to traditional programs like journalism and music and hello to new initiatives centred around artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and climate change at Mohawk College.
“The way we make decisions about programs and whether we keep them or not is based on market demand,” said Cebert Adamson, vice-president academic at Mohawk. “We are hearing, not only from our industrial partners, but we are looking at the labour market data that is coming out of the City of Hamilton, labour market data that is coming out of the province as well as Canada, to see what are the labour trends that are going to be coming and how are we adapting and rethinking our programming to be able to meet those.”
College officials meet twice yearly with city economic development staff to get updates on how they can provide training for businesses that have recently been established or are slated to set up shop in Hamilton, Adamson said.
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The college has suspended the applied music and journalism programs and Adamson said there is now a bigger focus on the skilled trades, health and human resources, cybersecurity, aircraft maintenance, electric vehicle maintenance, artificial intelligence, climate change, data and analytics, personal support worker (PSW) and other health-related programs to meet the demands of area employers.
“We’ve just established two electric vehicle labs at the Stoney Creek campus,” said Adamson, who noted while the college is currently offering partial or microcredits in electric vehicle training, a full EV program is in the works in the next two or three years.
The program will also train technicians currently employed by automakers.
Adamson said a group of Mohawk automotive technician instructors recently visited Alberta to get training on electric vehicles, including their batteries.
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“That’s a new area that we are getting into,” Adamson said.
He noted the college is moving into the field of artificial intelligence and they expect to offer postgraduate and degree programs in AI in the fall of 2025.
“There’s a high demand for it,” Adamson said.
Mostly recently, the college has added programs focused on data analytics management, trades management, electronic game design and animation to meet the demands of changing marketplace.
Adamson said the college is working on an academic action plan that will serve as a road map for the programs they will be offering over the next two to four years.
He expects the plan will be launched this summer.
Adamson said that all their programs are reviewed each year and he credits Mohawk’s nimbleness for being able to offer training for jobs in the traditional and digital economies.
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“Our closeness to industry has allowed us to do that quite consistently,” he said.
Adamson said Mohawk faculty are versatile and constantly upgrading their qualifications, so they can teach new programs.
More than 16,000 full-time students attend Mohawk College.
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