On June 11, Westinghouse electrical corporation unveiled their new nuclear engineering hub in Kitchener to create 100 new engineering jobs by 2025, including paid internship positions for university students and new graduates.
This 13,000-square-foot office marks a crucial step in the company’s commitment to Canada, its customers, and its workforce. “Their work will focus on supporting cutting-edge nuclear energy technologies right here in Ontario,” said Vic Fedeli, Ontario’s Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation, and Trade, in the hub’s promotional video. “This new engineering hub will create up to 100 new engineering jobs by 2025 with the ability to scale upwards to 400, which is tremendously exciting.”
“I can’t stress enough how important the internship program is for Westinghouse,” said Nathan Lewcock, the director of global engineering at Westinghouse. “There are paid positions so regardless of years of experience, whether you’re a first year engineering student or you’re completing your final year, we have paid internships across to hear students are definitely interested in.”
Westinghouse has been in the nuclear power industry since the mid-1900s and is looking to expand globally. “We engineer nuclear first of kind and next generation nuclear power plants,” Lewcock said. “We build some of the world’s largest and best nuclear power plants around the world.” This is their fifth engineering hub, known as the centre of excellence, that Westinghouse has around the world and they plan to add over 25 per cent more engineers globally.
The goals of this hub focus on innovation, the environment, and employee development. “The goal of the center of excellence is to continue to develop, engineers turn them into the next generation of subject matter experts leading the development of those technologies,” Lewcock said. “They’re working on development in that next generation technology to get us to those goals — those zero-carbon, those low-carbon goals in the next few decades.”
The goals also include collaboration and a variety of engineering disciplines. “The intent is to bring people together on the days in office so that they can get together and really collaborate and then work together and flush out ideas,” said Lewcock. “We’re supporting things from plant engineering across all disciplines… we’ve just started rolling out, over the last couple of years, a new mechatronic engineering organization.”
Westinghouse encourages the public to take a tour of the engineering hub and learn more about their internship program. “It’s a very hands-on approach to how we bring in those folks, and mentoring and shaping people’s professional development,” Lewcock said.
To learn more about this engineering hub, check out this video or go to their website.
