Background

I started in a family investment practice managing approximately $50 million in assets, under Ontario Securities Commission compliance. From there I moved into contact centre operations — managing teams of fifteen to thirty, then coordinating projects with full profit-and-loss responsibility.

The clearest example: a flagship client program that had to scale from 400 hours a week to 2,400 in four weeks. I built the training, ran the launch, and owned the numbers.

Later, between trade contracts, I sold institutional macroeconomic research to financial sector clients, working alongside a team of economists.

None of that is welding. All of it is program design, documentation discipline, regulated compliance, and accountability for a number at the end of the month.

I first ticketed in 2010 and spent the next twelve years in the field:

• Millwright and welding services on an active Canadian Forces installation, including boiler retube on institutional heritage infrastructure and major structural decommissioning
• Marine fabrication and in-situ repair under the Lloyd's inspection regime
• Pressure vessel and boiler fabrication in an ASME-stamped shop with N, S, and R authority and in-house VT, UT, PAUT, LP, MT, and radiography
• Seal welding inside concrete microtunnels for municipal stormwater and sewage infrastructure, under full confined space procedure
• High-rise gas and HVAC piping
• Specialist work across data centres, hospitals, and heritage restoration
• Alloy TIG on a fuel tank farm to B31.3 Category M, under 100% VT, LPI, and RT

I hold Ontario Certificates of Qualification in 456A Welder and 437A Metal Fabricator, both with Red Seal endorsement, and 456P Pressure Systems Welder under TSSA jurisdiction.

I began teaching night school GTAW at UA Local 46 in 2021 and moved to full-time apprenticeship instruction there in 2023. I develop curriculum for Terms 1 through 3 against the Red Seal 456A occupational standard.

Since 2024 I've served on standards committees across CSA, AWS, and ANSI — welding safety, arc welding equipment, and the qualification of welding inspectors.

Safety is where most of that work sits, and it's where the two halves of my background meet. Exposure control, fume and gas hazards, and inspector qualification are all fundamentally systems problems.

Trades training is a technical undertaking and a commercial one. The commercial questions are ordinary in an operations role: what a seat actually costs to deliver, whether instructor time is being used well, whether a new stream will pay for the equipment it needs, whether a program is viable at the enrolment it can realistically attract.

Answering them well requires being able to assess the technical work too — otherwise the numbers get applied to the wrong things.

I've worked on both sides. That's the whole of it.

Trades curriculum is usually written by subject-matter experts with no grounding in instructional design. The material comes out technically correct and hard to learn from.

Everything I build works to a documented standard. Structural decisions trace to research in adult learning, cognitive load, and multimedia instruction, or to WCAG 2.2 and the AODA — with citations. When a program committee has to defend a purchase, that matters more than the page count.

I didn't learn that discipline in a welding shop. I brought it with me.