Greetings BCTEA members. The BCTEA executive are ready to share some early details for next October’s PSA Day conference. There are some exciting additional opportunities, particularly for metal teachers, so we suggest you take a few moments to look over this information.
We are excited to let you know that this coming conference we are partnering with both the Canadian Welding Bureau (CWB) and the UA Piping Industry College of BC (PIC). The conference will take place as usual on the provincial pro-d day (Friday October 24th) and this year the location will be at the Piping Trades College located on Annacis Island. The BCTEA Conference will have a typical outline for the day, with varied tech ed workshops to choose from, vendors to visit and wrangle deals with and a social at the end to wind down (the social will also be held at the college to make things simpler, more on this in the future.)
Beyond the typical pro-d conference, the CWB are keen to connect with us and are offering spaces for BCTEA members to attend their Welding Educators Conference (see link here.) To try and make this accessible they are holding their conference at the same location (the PIC) and the two days before our BCTEA conference. The CWB (and of course PIC) will be joining us on the Friday and providing some workshops, but some of you may be interested in extending your pro-d this year by additionally attending the Welding Educators conference. This could include the full day of welding training on the Thursday! We all know that getting funding to cover a TTOC is tough, so the CWB are also offering bursaries (up to $2500!) to cover costs above your usual pro-d allotment. If this sounds like an interesting opportunity to you, we suggest you look into these bursaries (hey, another link here) soon as there are a limited number.
The bursary application and conference registration for the CWB Welding Educators Conference are both live now. Stay tuned for the BCTEA Friday conference registration to open up in the coming weeks. Finally, if you missed it, the executive sent a call out for BCTEA conference presenters last week. If you have something to share with the rest of us, we’d love to hear from you.
We are already looking forward to seeing you in October!
The BCTEA Executive