Shaun Barr
Chair, Algonquin College Construction Trades and Building Systems and Perth Campus
Heating, Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Technician – Class of 1993
No one is prouder of the success of Algonquin College’s apprenticeship programs than Shaun Barr.
Barr, Chair of the Perth Campus since 2019 and Chair of Construction Trades and Buildings Systems at the Ottawa Campus since 2015, has spent over a decade at the College teaching the trades, helping develop new courses and labs alongside his faculty team, and ensuring students graduate fully prepared for the professional life ahead of them.
“People with the kind of skills they learn at the College are needed everywhere,” Barr says. “That’s why I’m so proud to work with a team that is dedicated to this task. We built the welding lab and the new electrical lab. We added pre-apprenticeships in Electrical in Pembroke, in Brick and Stone in Perth, Indigenous Cook and Welding in Ottawa. We have the Gas Technician program running in Akwesasne, of which I’m particularly proud.”
The students who emerge from the College will enter or return to the job market with more than technical skills. Barr notes that much has changed in the way tradespeople deal with the public in recent times.
“Computers are a huge part of the trades now. You need soft skills and people skills. When I was younger, HVAC technicians were dressed poorly and they’d show up in trucks that were falling apart. Now when service technicians arrive at your door, they look like a salesperson, and at 24 they’re driving a $50,000 truck. They are likely pretty good communicators. You have to be: the customer expects it.”
Barr is no slouch at communicating the merits of the trades himself and in motivating others to discover their potential as a career. It’s surprising, then, to discover that his own career in the trades and his journey toward teaching was neither simple nor linear.
To start, Barr did not succeed in his first run at post-secondary education. He attended St. Lawrence College for Electrical Engineering and Technology but didn’t graduate. His heart wasn’t in it, he says. He was encouraged to take the program by one of his high school teachers but he was never persuaded it was right for him. The program was valuable all the same, he quickly points out – he has made good use of his training many times over. But when he left the program Barr returned home feeling discouraged and “kind of lost.”
Family came to his aid. His father-in-law observed the work he was doing around the house and saw Barr was good with his hands. “So he said, ‘Why don’t you go and take the HRAC (Heating, Refrigeration/Ventilation and Air Conditioning) program at Algonquin and I’ll hire you. I did and he did. Long story made short, eventually I bought the heating company from him and ran it for 15 years.”
In the years that followed, Barr regularly hired Algonquin HRAC graduates to staff the company and taught them his way of doing things. More than one person told him he was good at this and suggested he might want to return to the College to do some part-time teaching. Sometime in the early 2000s he did precisely that, coming on stream as a partial-load instructor.
“There was too much going on in my company for me to do more than that,” he says. “I couldn’t leave it.” But he enjoyed teaching, and when a full-time position came up in 2008, he applied for it and was hired. Shortly afterwards, he was made coordinator of the HRAC program. “My life pretty much flipped right then.” In 2014, he was asked to be Acting Chair and he began working toward his Master of Education in Leadership and Learning, which he earned from the University of Prince Edward Island.
Apprenticeship and trades have been his focus ever since, in his capacity as a leader at the College and in other roles: in 2019, he was elected to the Canadian Apprenticeship Forum’s Board of Directors for a four-year term. He deals with individual students on a daily basis. He continues to advance the cause of women in trades, which he says is slowly gaining momentum. He’s on “tons” of committees and initiatives and works closely with his teams in the Algonquin Centre for Construction Excellence (ACCE) and Perth.
He is also happy to speak with the occasional parent who is distraught when a young student struggles to succeed in one of the College’s programs.
“It happens, you know? The parent is very upset, the student is terrified. And I can say to them, ‘This isn’t the end of the world.’ They say, ‘That’s easy for you to say, you’re sitting in the Chair’s job.’ And I can point out that, ‘Well, I failed out of college too, and it turned out OK for me.’ You have to give people confidence to move forward any way you can.”