James Cumming believes in the importance of giving back to the community.

After building a successful career on the foundation of his Construction Engineering Technology diploma (’81), the CEO of Creative Door Services and 2003 Alumni Award of Distinction recipient now has the ultimate opportunity to give back to his alma mater.

Cumming began his three-year term as chair of NAIT’s Board of Governors in October.

Recruiting a new president was Cumming’s first priority; last week, the Board announced the selection of Dr. Glenn Feltham as the institute’s sixth president & CEO.

With that momentous task completed, we talk to Cumming about his priorities as chair – and learn what makes him tick.

As told to Fiona Bensler

I am an Edmontonian, born and raised, and I have family here.

I am a NAIT grad, my wife’s a NAIT grad, and my daughter attended NAIT and played on the soccer team. We’ve got a lot of roots with NAIT.

I wanted to be in the construction industry, so I was looking for a program that would provide all the base fundamentals to allow me to enter the marketplace fairly quickly.

NAIT gave me a broad education on many different areas of construction and project management, which allowed me to manage projects very early in my career.

The education was the foundation I needed that ultimately led to a career that has included owning and leading several different businesses.

The way that the program was set up created a tremendous sense of teamwork. We ended up not only working and studying with our classmates, but we also spent a lot of time outside of the classroom together.

This became very important as I went out into the construction world because when you’re building a project, you are building it with a team.

The learning continues once you start working, but at least you have some basic tools so that when you run into problems, you’ve got some problem-solving ability based on your education.

This was my experience from my NAIT education, and I’ve found that when I work with NAIT grads, it’s still true today. 

As I built my career and my firm, it became more about business management.

With this in mind, I looked for a course that would give me a little wider background and I liked the flavour of the Harvard Business School, where I took the executive education Owner/President Management program and was exposed to all different areas of business.

I am very passionate about the institute and am excited about the prospects for NAIT. We have a group of Board members who are extremely proud of all the work that has been done to date and are very excited about what the future looks like.

Our focus is to work with the president to ensure NAIT reaches its full potential by providing the environment for student success and ensuring we meet employers’ needs in the marketplace.

We also have a funding request in to government for the Centre for Applied Technologies, which we’d like to get started on in the near term.

(NAIT’s top campus expansion priority, the 44,800-square-metre centre will accommodate about 5,000 full-time students learning in advanced simulation environments in health sciences, business, applied building science, and resources and environmental management programs.)

While we recognize that there are many budget constraints, we also believe that there is a huge demand for training and will be in the future because of the economy in Alberta.

I have a philosophy of giving back to the community. I have been involved with a variety of different things like the Chamber of Commerce, Junior Achievement and the construction association, to name a few.

I have this ingrained philosophy that I probably got from my parents and, in particular from my dad, that you need to give back to your community and, frankly, I get back so much more from doing so.

Probably the not-for-profit that’s closest to my heart is Muscular Dystrophy Canada, where I was the national chair for a two-year period.

I helped them with a strategy to overcome some pretty difficult times and had to look for some different revenue sources. I found that it’s always the clients and the people involved that are just so giving and so appreciative of that kind of work. I really enjoyed that period of time.

We set up a research fund in my son’s name at the University of Alberta, the Friends of Garret Cumming Research Chair of Muscular Dystrophy. My son has a form of muscular dystrophy, so that’s why it’s pretty close to home.

About five years ago, after my intense involvement with that association, I changed my focus to education and actively looked to get involved with NAIT.

I wanted to get involved with NAIT. My NAIT education helped train me to do what I do. I have pretty close attachment to the institute, so here we are today.