The past two years have been marked by big changes in education and industry due to COVID-19, but George Brown College continues to offer innovative ways for our students to get real-world learning and work experience in their programs.
Providing practical experience, as well as being agile and industry responsive, is central to what we do as a polytechnic institution. We work with industry leaders on program development and applied research to ensure students are ready to hit the ground running in the workforce.
All our career-focused programs provide a work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunity. WIL at George Brown can take many forms and includes, apprenticeships, clinical placements, virtual work placements with Canadian or international companies, consulting to solve real-world problems for community or industry partners or fostering entrepreneurship and getting students’ business ideas off the ground.
Dario Guescini, George Brown’s Director of Work-Integrated Learning, Experiential Education and Global Mobility, sat down with Polytechnics Canada to outline how the college adopted innovative technologies and forged new industry connections to ensure students could continue putting classroom learning into practice.
“Over the course of the pandemic, we launched virtual co-ops and remote work placements, which were new to everyone. Technological innovation is part of GBC’s strategy, and this helped us accelerate remote WIL opportunities during COVID,” Guescini said.
“Technology also allowed us to provide our students with virtual international WIL experiences. Working with organizations on the other side of the world, students were able to practice the soft skills specific to remote work, such as time management, resiliency, entrepreneurship and professional communication.”
Learn more about work-integrated learning at George Brown. Check out Polytechnics Canada’s article, Work-Integrated Learning at George Brown.
