McDonald’s employees can get a credit at Ontario colleges

By Demii Niles

BELLEVILLE– Loyalist College will be participating as one of the 24 Ontario colleges in a partnership with McDonald’s.

Starting this month, employees who do workplace management training at McDonald’s will be given the chance to earn a credit toward their first year Business Administration diploma. The new program was announced in August.

“We have McDonald’s employees in our community – why wouldn’t they take advantage of this?” said Janet Leavey, program co-ordinator for first-year Business Administration at Loyalist. “If McDonald’s sees value in their employees to train them to want to be managers, why shouldn’t they take that training and use it for educational credits? I think it’s just a win-win situation and it’s an attractive recruiting tool for McDonald’s to have.”

Tim Fellows, a first-year social service student at Loyalist, said: “It gives them the initiative to go out and get a better education so they don’t have to spend the rest of their lives saying, ‘Do you want fries with that?’ ”

Emily Kellett, a second-year child and youth care student, said that working at McDonald’s is “a good first job to learn the experience and get the idea of working in a restaurant.” Giving students the chance to  get a college credit while working there is “a cool thing for McDonald’s to do.”

Loyalist’s dean of business administration, Jim Whiteway, said the college became involved at the beginning of the project. He himself  used to be a manager at a local McDonald’s, he said. Because of that, “I was asked to be part of the team that worked with McDonald’s to draft the agreement.”