Welcome to BC TradesRoute, the trades as a learning pathway.I've walked this road with my daughter. Here's the map.

Ask around and you'll hear it: quiet doubts about whether the trades are a "worthy" pathway for a bright kid, or the assumption that choosing a trade means a young person can never go to university. Most of those ideas are decades out of date. But they don't live in policy documents — they live in us, in what we absorbed about where and when we came of age.

I'll start with myself. I hold a PhD. I'm a faculty member at a business school at a research-intensive university. University education was my sole pathway to upward mobility — my own form of structured, post-secondary learning. So when my daughter first talked about welding at fifteen, my gut reaction wasn't excitement. It was the reflex I'd been trained in: real learning happens in a lecture hall, credentials come with Latin names, and anything else is a detour. I had to sit with that before I could sit with her plans.

What I've learned, and what I'd hand to you, is this: the trades and university aren't opposites. Apprenticeship is structured, post-secondary learning: a defined curriculum, standardized exams, college faculty and journeyperson mentors, and paid, supervised practice along the way. It leads to the Red Seal, Canada's highest interprovincial standard in a trade, and it can lead onward from there. Journeypersons ladder into applied degrees at BCIT, TRU and UFV, into management, or into running their own companies. For many families, the trade is what pays for that university door, rather than closing it.

So before you plan anything, do what the circle of adults around my daughter had to do — and what I, her mom at the centre of that circle, am still doing: check your own assumptions. Ask where they came from, and what year they're from. Then look at the pathway as it actually exists today.

If you've been half-watching the news, you've probably noticed it: announcement after announcement about the trades. This year alone, B.C. is adding 5,000 new trades training seats — including 224 right here at Vancouver Community College — backed by $241 million over three years. Ottawa has its own wave going, with the Team Canada Strong plan and a $5,000 completion bonus for apprentices. Every few weeks there's something new.

I'll be honest: if I were doing this with my daughter today, I'd find all of that genuinely exciting and completely overwhelming. Good news arrives from two governments, several agencies and every college at once, and it's hard to tell which parts actually touch your family and which are aimed at somebody else. That noise is exactly why I built this site. Everywhere else here, I've done the sorting for you and put the pieces into a route. Below are the announcements themselves, straight from the source, if you want to read the originals.