Kassie Burkholder’s career path has been anything but straight and narrow. She’s painted lines on pavement, eventually working her way to being a road-crew foreperson; she’s been a consultant; she was the co-owner of Salgado-Fenwick, an Edmonton fashion business, and the Barking Buffalo Cafe.
For a person who has consistently reinvented herself, education has been key. She believes strongly in life-long learning, and that pretty well anywhere can be a classroom. Sitting in her office on the fourth floor of NAIT’s Productivity and Innovation Centre, her eyes are wide, and she consistently moves in her chair as she talks about the different ways her team helps create and customize new courses to fill the educational gaps that industry partners tell the school they see in their workplaces.
“I literally think of us as the concept car at NAIT,” she says. “We’re free to explore different ideas. We licence content, we have revenue-share agreements with industry partners, we have local partnerships. We have clients like the World Bank and the IMF, in addition to 86 Indigenous partner organizations and non-profits. We work with international organizations. Although NAIT is a cool place as it exists, we are in this little corner that gets to act like a business and be entrepreneurial.”
Her department works with Indigenous clients and new Canadians. It develops plans for new degrees and certificates. She’s worked on a deal that would see NAIT train miners in Argentina. Her department is working on building a bricks-and-mortar training facility — a “mini NAIT,” Burkholder says — in Ghana, west Africa.
“This is why what we do matters,” she says. “The field of education is no longer bums in seats sitting in classrooms for a four-year degree, anymore. It’s just-in-time training, it’s skill development. They are industry-relevant things, employable skills.”
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
