What makes a polytechnic is an evolving concept.
Polytechnics Canada, an umbrella group that is promoting the model, defines polytechnics as offering "career-focused applied education that spans trades through to advanced degrees, delivered in an environment where students receive hands-on training that enables them to more readily apply their skills."
Rick Miner, president of Seneca College in Toronto and co-author of a recent report that recommended three new polytechnics for New Brunswick, describes a polytechnic this way:
- It is more concerned with application than theory; there will be theory, but the raison d'être will be application.
- It offers a variety of credentials: apprenticeships, certificate programs, diploma programs of one and two years, undergraduate degrees and possibly graduate degrees — a whole menu of choice.
- Those choices are interrelated, with a laddering of programs. For example, a student could begin with a two-year diploma program, get a job, and then return to study for a degree.
- It is student-centred in the way it designs courses and promotes faculty. 
- There is applied research. There may be a role for pure research, but value is attached to applied research.
- There is community focus and involvement; the mission of the school encompasses community needs and desires.
- The governance system is designed to be responsive to the needs of the community.
Polytechnics Canada has seven members: British Columbia Institute of Technology; SAIT Polytechnic, Calgary; Conestoga Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Kitchener, Ont.; and George Brown College, Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Seneca College and Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning in Toronto. (The Northern Alberta Institute of Technology recently broke ranks with Polytechnics Canada; a spokeswoman for NAIT said it felt the group did not have a national focus.)
Polytechnics Canada has three main priorities: increased funding for applied research; collaborative initiatives between government, industry and institutions of applied learning to solve skills shortages in the labour force; and creation of a national credentials framework for transferability of credits and academic mobility.
