Matt Matwyshyn Comes Back to Confederation College to Do Some Recruiting of His Own

Matt Matwyshyn’s recent recruitment visit was his first time at Confederation College since graduating from the Aviation (now Aerospace) Manufacturing Engineering Technology program in 2002. Coming back to talk with those same students 20+ years later brought him full circle.

“At the stage of my career that I’m at now, it’s rewarding to be able to interact with students at the beginning of theirs,” Matt said. “We wanted to re-engage with some of the colleges we were in contact with over the years. The people who I’ve worked with at Boeing coming out of Confederation College are high-performing contributors and the go-to people.”

That certainly describes Matt as well. He was whisked away to his first job in Halifax before his graduation ceremony, landing a position with IMP Aerospace & Defence. He mainly worked as a Production Planner and estimator on the Lockheed CP-140 Aurora, a military patrol aircraft. Halifax was home for several years except for a short stint in Hornell, New York where we worked on a six-month rail contract for TTA Systems. Then, he got handpicked for a job in his hometown of Winnipeg.

“Boeing called me, because they had a résumé on file from a previous application,” he said. After 10 months of working in CNC planning at Boeing, he transferred back to his field of manufacturing engineering (ME) planning. He worked in ME for 15 years, eventually taking a department lead position. For the last seven months, he’s worked with the tool engineering group – and doing recruitment.

Matt reflected back on his career after coming back to Thunder Bay. Born and raised in Winnipeg, he took a college-level aerospace course offered at a local high school. He later heard about the program at Confederation College, touted as a good entry-way to the industry.
“The more I looked at it, the more I thought it would be a good fit,” he said.

Matt was right. Since graduating from the program, he has worked in a variety of different aspects of aircraft manufacturing, engineering, and maintenance. It also sparked his love of lifelong learning. Home life has been great too; he and his wife Aileen now have a family of three boys. 

“I’ll always be an advocate for Confederation College,” Matt said. “It’s opened doors for me.”