| Front page | | Contents | | Previous | | Next |

Greenland

Specialising in everything

The vocational education and training system is ready to train people to refurbish housing and institutional buildings. All that is needed now is the starting signal - the release of the money granted for the refurbishment programme.

It is an ambitious goal to have a fully developed training and education system for a population about the size of that of Esbjerg but spread over 18 municipalities around the coast of Greenland.

For many reasons, Greenland has decided to train its own building tradesmen.

It already has a longstanding tradition for training carpenters, plumbers, painters and other trades needed in the building and construction sector in Greenland.

The Building and Construction School in Sisimiut is the home of the vocational training schemes, all of which have been designed for the special Greenlandic conditions. You can read about the schemes below, but I can already reveal that one of the main things the school tries to teach the coming building tradesmen is to act on their own initiative.

Waiting Time

A start must soon be made on the refurbishment of nursing homes, hospitals, kindergartens, public infrastructure, housing, etc., but the question is, whether there are enough qualified people for this gigantic task. I put that question to Torben Jürgensen, the Principal of the Building and Construction School in Sisimiut.

He tells me: "In Greenland we have a large number of qualified people for the different jobs that are needed within building and construction.

We already have qualified manpower in most building trades and are only waiting for the politicians to release the money for the refurbishment work.

In cooperation with an Adult Vocational Training Centre in Denmark, the Building and Construction School is training people for work with concrete, but the refurbishment project has not really got going yet, so there are quite a few that have dropped out of the course."

Torben Jürgensen points out that a long wait is dangerous if one wants to keep qualified manpower. With the politicians dragging their feet and nobody knowing where it is all going to end, some people find other jobs, and one can hardly blame them for that!

The school has pressed for a specification of the refurbishment work so that it can offer the right courses.

Jack of all trades

Nowadays, timber is the most widely used material in house building in Greenland, so the main training courses are in carpentry and joinery.

However, there is actually a wide range of work in Greenland, including construction and maintenance of roads, airports and harbours, and blasting work for new urban developments. These projects have led to the introduction of a special course for blasting contractors that has been designed specifically for Arctic conditions. This course is only offered in Greenland.

Most people are trained within the traditional building trades: carpentry, joinery, painting, and plumbing. There are no courses in Greenland at present for bricklayers and masons because there are very few brick built and masonry houses. However, many of the concrete buildings from the 1960s and 1970s need refurbishment. The trouble here is that buildings from that period in both Denmark and Greenland were built using industrialised building methods, whereas refurbishment calls more for good, old-fashioned craftsmanship. In principle, it takes more skill to repair a building than to build a new one.

In response to this, the vocational training courses are being changed. A new vocational training and education system is being developed in which all the people that are not on a carpentry, joinery, painting or plumbing course are gathered together for combined basic training. This means that they are trained to participate in many different kinds of work.

The difference between vocational training in Greenland and Denmark is that, in Greenland, a student starts off training as a kind of "jack of all trades" and can then go on to a course in a specific trade. It is initiative that is needed, particularly on jobs in settlements.

Training Greenlandic manpower means that the knowledge and experience gained stays in Greenland instead of flying off back to Denmark or to other countries when the jobs come to an end.

Building gangs

There are conspicuous differences between a Greenlandic building gang and a foreign one. When a foreign gang comes to Greenland to carry out a job, the gang's members usually want to put in as many hours a day as possible. They take the view that since they are here, they can just as well earn as much money as possible as quickly as possible during a short, hectic summer.

Greenlandic workers have a fundamentally different attitude. They want work for as long as possible and preferably right through the winter, and they want an ordinary working day, weekends off, etc.

Greenlandic workers have their families on the spot. The foreign workers are either single or have their families in Denmark, Norway or Iceland.

I ask whether that means that mixed gangs are a really bad idea.

Torben Jürgensen replies: "Not necessarily, provided things are properly planned, but it is difficult. It is often the politicians that get in the way of proper planning. The Finance Act will be passed in the autumn, and the money released at the beginning of the New Year when the budget planning is in order. A start will then be made on analyses, design work, etc. That work will be finished sometime in the summer. Tenders will then be invited for the project, so the actual work cannot start until possibly the late summer. In other words, it will be outdoor, winter work, which is obviously more costly and rushed. At the same time, the building project must largely be completed before it has begun."

Regional vocational schools

With the revision of the training and education system that is now being implemented, the role of the local vocational schools that used to be an important element of the vocational training schemes has come to an end. Instead, training in building and construction is now concentrated in four regional vocational schools located in Sisimiut (Holsteinborg), Aasiaat (Egedesminde), Nuuk (Godthåb) and Narssaq.

At all four schools, students start with a combined basic training course in building and construction. No specialisation from the start. Directly into the combined system.

Another innovation is that specialised courses can now be held in other towns. A blasting and contracting course has just been held in Nanortalik for road renovation.

If there is an urgent task we can obtain instructors from our business partners for almost any kind of work. This also upgrades the qualifications of local instructors.

It is not difficult to get the message about a new course out. The schools use TV - everyone watches TV in the wintertime. They also use the newspapers, and lastly, there is "kamikposten" - the grapevine - passing on the message about good courses from mouth to mouth.

Denmark went from the apprenticeship system to basic vocational education and then back to what can be called semiapprenticeship, which is almost what vocational training and education in Greenland can be called. A trainee period at companies is a very important element of the training. A lot of attention is paid to ensuring that young people gain plenty of practical experience.

Dropping out and bottlenecks

Torben Jürgensen describes what has usually happened in a typical year: "What has happened up to the present time is that about 160 suitable young people register for the vocational training schemes in the building and construction trades - that is almost 20 per cent of potential students in a school year. Only 90 of them are accepted - in other words, a large proportion of the applicants is rejected. One of the bottlenecks is that there has to be an agreement on a practical training place before the course starts. It is relatively cheap for an employer to have a young person for the first year because his or her wages are refunded by an employers' contribution fund. During that year, one can see whether the young person can cope with the job.

"Up to 40 young persons drop out of the courses in the first two months. This means that the regional vocational school receives around 45 students after one year, i.e. half the number that started one year earlier at the local vocational school. Of those 45, more than 30 become qualified tradesmen. So the drop-out rate on the vocational training courses in the final three years is relatively low."

A pilot training scheme for adult apprentices is in progress in Sisimiut (Holsteinborg) and Nuuk (Godthåb). This scheme was started in Sisimiut in1999. At that time, nine people joined the scheme, and of those, five passed their exams and received their certificates in plumbing and painting.

Artic engineer

At the entrance to the Building and Construction School in Sisimiut stands a sign bearing the words "Centre for Arctic Technology".

This is where building engineers specialise in Arctic technology.

It is obvious that Greenland is going to need many building engineers with this speciality - engineers who can plan, design and supervise building projects. It is planners and building technicians that receive this training at the centre, i.e. supervisors and site supervisors. It was hoped that half the people on the Arctic engineering course that started in September 2001 would be Danes, and half would be Greenlanders. However, only a single Dane was interested in this extra specialisation in Arctic engineering. The remaining eight on the course are Greenlanders.

There is only one permanent teacher at the centre - Egil Borchersen. He is an associate professor at the Technical University of Denmark but is stationed in Sisimiut. The education is very much based on teachers from Denmark holding intensive twoweek courses in Sisimiut. Mathematics is taught by the centre's own teaching staff.

Nine people are hardly enough to create a university milieu, but Egil Borchersen hopes that there will be more students next year.

Sisimiut University does not offer IT engineering or heavy current engineering courses. For these courses, people have to go to Denmark or somewhere else. However, there are, for example, no more theology students at Nuuk University than engineering students at Sisimiut University.

In fact, in Greenland only the course of education for administrators has relatively many students - 30 at present.

Arctic research

What should preferably happen next is for funds to be made available for some project staff that would be attached to the centre for a number of years and thus be able to help create a real research and university milieu.

Research should focus mainly on the special impacts to which buildings and public works are subjected in the Arctic. That means the permafrost, which pushes foundations, and the extreme Arctic climate, which affects the rest of buildings. The harsh Arctic climate has a devastating effect on many building materials because of their moisture content. This applies particularly to concrete structures.

Most of the housing built in Greenland in the last 40 years has been built in accordance with Danish/Norwegian building traditions. It would be exciting to explore how a house perfectly adapted to conditions in Greenland would look. The ecological Arctic house, or, using the same recipe, the fully sustainable urban district in Greenland.

There is a wide range of other exciting, urgently needed research projects that would be perfect for such an educational institution - for example, transport routes, communication, refurbishment technology, waste management, water supply, environmental protection, surveying, position-fixing and solar energy.

Full-scale tests of solar energy have already been carried out with three experimental installations on the roofs of some of the hostels for students at the Building and Construction School. The results show that the sun gives off more energy in Greenland than in Denmark. It has therefore been suggested that it be made mandatory, in connection with refurbishment, for all hot water tanks to be prepared for solar heat and that in future the use of solar heat be made mandatory in all public buildings.

It is said that in many of these fields and particularly within education, Greenland has achieved so much that it could act as a model for other parts of the Arctic.

| Front page | | Contents | | Previous | | Next | | Top |