The city is located along the Magdalena river and almost at sea-level: super hot & humid tropical climate. Not an easy climate, but since it is at a central location of a lot of the regions oil exploration, it has been growing. Because of the presence of a few large companies, the local SENA training center has build good partnerships with that industry for whom it trains many technicians and technologists. It is well equipped. Let me show you around at this training center with some photos:
A couple of interesting outside training "labs" such as this "high altitude" work platform with a focus on worker's safety and good practices. Below a few of the electricity training outside labs:
And a traing terrain for heavy equipment training (hope you can make out the Caterpillar machines out there on the photo). The center has a variety of electrical programs. Joe Vandenboom and our son Mark (possibly going into that direction of engineering) will like these photos. The center has some excellent state-of-the-art laboratories and training & simulation equipment:
Termal heat exchange simulation plant and solid waste seperation simulation plant:
Well organized dangerous materials training. The campus has also a constant message everywhere for safety and environmental awareness, such as recycling bins. However, just putting the bins there does not right away result in changed behaviours. The "green bin" was full of plastic bottles and other waste. But then again, at Niagara College I am always angered by the parking lots at the end of the day with lots of litter of people opening their car door and simply tossing garbage on the ground (while there are plenty of garbage bins at just a short walking distance at all parking lots). Laziness and related behaviour is not easy to change...
This sign says: "You can live withoout food for two months, and without water for two weeks, but you can only live without air for a few minutes". A daily reminder to reflect on. The campus has a variety of mechanical programs with basic work-bench training to sophisticated CAD-CAM (Computer Aided Design & Manufacturing) and CNC (Computer Numeric Controls) machines:
They had just received a 3D prototype copy machine ("printing" 3D plastic prototype products directly from the computer technical drawings to see if the design is good enough to make on the work-bench and/or CNC machines). I think some Canadian colleges would love to have training equipment like that. The students are from all age groups and it was nice to see a fair amount of young female students in these technical programs:
A production simulation applied research laboratory of state-of-the art level. Also excellent chemical labs and a library with inspiring photos for the student's employment environment upon graduation. The full-time programs students all have different "uniforms" (like we saw at the Medellin training center with the students in different health programs). They also have their personal names on the uniform; a touch which I liked and I think stimulates the students to think in a professional way already during their training programs
The center has a fully equipped video conference room with capacity for 20 people. I think we will use this center sometimes for our EFE program for linking with colleagues in Canada. Most centers have a video conference room, but this one looked really nice and its location is centrally between the EFE project regions of the south of the Bolivar province and the north-east of Antioquia province.
The campus has a "job center" (Centro de Empleo) open for the public and its students. There is also a consultancy office for start-up entrepreneurs (with some room for business incubators):
"Emprendete" is a popular way to say: "why not start your own business?" (it is a national program in Colombia in which SENA participates). They offer a wide variety of services very much comparable to what the community colleges offer in Canada.
While we walked around we saw a community session on human rights and a training program for adults working (or interested to work) in the telecommunication sector. Such a variety of activities every day at this campus; again, very similar to what one can find at Canadian community colleges. And of course also some room for sports on campus:
On our way back to Bogota I had a nice suprise: we flew back in a Fokker 50 aircraft, produced by the company I worked for in "sales & marketing" from 1983 to 1988. Sweet memories and nice to see these planes still in "active duty" (Fokker stopped production of new aircrafts in 1996). A bit of Dutch "past glory" on display next to the current giants of Boeing and Aircraft:
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