Great Plains College Alumni, Rod Taylor and his son Cody Taylor are both former graduates of the college’s Welding Certificate program at the Rosetown Campus.  Since graduation Rod has started his own shop, CRT Welding, in Biggar, SK. CRT Welding’s main focus is designing and building forms for industry use. Forms are built to create large cement blocks for business and industry. Once the cement block is formed it is taken out to industry to provide containment in underground mines, barriers along mountains as well as assisting in defining borders around parking lots.

Rod recently provided students at Great Plains College in the Rosetown Welding program with the opportunity to learn directly from an industry supplier. Partnering with GPC Welding instructor Dave Legge, CRT challenged the students in this year’s Welding Certificate program to use the skills they had learned to design and manufacture some forms for CRT Welding.

“When Rod approached us with this partnership idea it was easy to see that this kind of experience would be very beneficial for our students,” said Legge. “Students would not otherwise have had this particular experience as part of the program.”

CRT provided the materials required for the work and Rod and Dave worked together to demonstrate what shop practices were required to meet standards of quality of work within industry. This allowed students to apply the welding theory and experience that they had gained in the program in an industry setting, while meeting program requirements..

“Both the students and Dave put a lot of work into making sure that their work met our standards and the required curriculum, and we were able to fill our demand. It was the perfect partnership project”, says Taylor.

In appreciation of the time the students spent working on the project Rod has donated $6,000 to the Great Plains College Scholarship fund. This donation will go directly to new students entering the welding program in Rosetown.

For more information on the GPC Welding Program or the GPC Scholarship program, visit www.greatplainscollege.ca or call the college at 1-866-296-2472.