Fortis Belize Partners with UB: New Initiative to Produce More Local Engineers

Fortis Belize and the University of Belize have joined forces to produce more local engineers. The organizations signed a memorandum of understanding this week to bolster the university’s engineering programs. Chief Executive Officer for Fortis Belize, Kay Menzies, says the idea is to counter the effects of the brain drain phenomenon affecting several areas of expertise.

Kay Menzies, CEO, Fortis Belize: “We’re really excited about that one. I think when it comes to knowledge sharing Belize gains by collaboration and I think everybody here would accept that. And we’ve been able to work with UB. We’ve been talking with them for a little while and particularly, they are interested to see what the engineering opportunities here are. The main categories of engineering that we use here are civil, mechanical, and electrical. We also use others, but those are the three main. And with UB, getting deeper with their engineering school. They of course want their students to know there’s somewhere to go. We don’t want to be educating people to go away and think that there’s no engineering work in Belize. So we began talking to UB and UB was quite excited to talk to us and we found several areas of mutual collaboration. One, they’ve opened an environmental lab that we’re able to use for the testing that we need to do annually and even quarterly. There is a mechanics workshop that our chief mechanical engineer we almost lost him one day because he was like a kid in a candy store. So he’s happy to work with UB on that. We also find that we can offer internships when we’re in heavy maintenance season so that these young engineers can get hands-on experience with what we do and give us their ideas. As we tell you, one of the things we love is when people ask why. So you bring your ideas, you bring your collaboration and the lecturers as well will be invited in to work with us and work with our teams so that they can bring the real world experience back to the classroom. Sometimes that doesn’t happen in academia, but UB is quite open to that. So we have had a very wide ranging conversation. The MOU I think will lead to great things in collaboration and innovation and I would like to see more of that. I think we’ve started it but I think there’s a lot more opportunity for that in Belize and it will only benefit the students coming up. As the government is talking about STEM and STEAM, these kids start to study science, they start to study maths and engineering. These are the kinds of places where your careers end up when you do that and it’s really interesting stuff.”

We’ll have more from Fortis Belize in our subsequent newscast.