Barron Trade Stories

(upbeat music) - My name's Dan Millspaugh. I am the technical service manager at Barron Heating, transitioning into a full-time training instructor. My previous jobs were all within a refrigeration environment. I was working in an industry for about 17 years when the company I worked for closed down. So I needed to make a choice in a new career. I chose to look at the HVAC industry. There was a lot of things I liked. I liked that I could get in a vehicle and basically be my own boss for the day. Grab some orders and go out and diagnose and fix things, which was intriguing. I don't know that most people realize the trades are out there, but I think a lot of the school deans usually guide the students to a four-year degree or a university degree, rather than trades. There's not enough people going into the trades. There's a huge demand for technicians. My reason for going to Barron is I was looking for full-time employment. So when I went to Barron, they're a larger company. They absolutely guaranteed me 40 hours a week. I like the family environment at Barron Heating. They really care about their people. They're forward thinking and very active in the industry. They're not gonna sit stagnant. They're always gonna grow. They're gonna progress, and they're actually gonna set the bar for other companies and lead the curve. So that's what drew me to Barron Heating, and it's kept me there actually. The technicians school is gonna basically give us the foundation for what Barron Heating does. Plus it's a paid position. You get paid to learn rather than pay to go to school. I would say at Barron Heating, we have a great support team. We have an outstanding depth in knowledge that you can draw from. We take care of our own. We wanna make sure everybody succeeds. We want to progress everybody. When they're successful, we're successful. So it's all about trying to meet the needs of customers, meet the needs of our technicians. And when that works out, the company thrives. (upbeat music)

My name is Jim Slagle. I am a commercial senior service tech for Barron Heating. Barron Heating has been taking care of me for this will be my twenty fifth year. HVAC kind of chose me. I've always been handy. I can fix things. I guess when I was a sophomore in high school, I started looking at career paths vocationally, and had family that was in HVAC business, and I liked the description of what being in the was work for. She said, twenty five years ago, she said, Baron Heating. So that's where I applied, and that's where I have been. There was four service techs back then. Now there's a whole bunch. It's been a lot of fun. It's been us going from really small to where we're at now, just evolving and evolving and evolving and more training and more schooling and seeing all the new technology that comes up. Every single year, everything's changing. The entire company is constantly staying relevant. But I think one thing that's always stayed the same is it's always felt like a family oriented place. It's just and everything's kinda stayed consistent with training, staying ahead of the game, keeping the the best vehicles, just trying to keep a a good respectable company. There's not enough students right now graduating out of technical colleges for this. It's it's actually in decline. There's a demand for these technicians that nobody can supply you. So how do you how do you work through that? You should start your own school. We have our own training school now. Barron Heating has their own technical school, which other people don't have. And you have the best people training them that have had years and years of experience set up as one of the best schools I think you can personally go to. You have to be self motivated. You have to keep going and, you know, the best qualities are definitely gonna be personable, have a smile on your face, be willing to learn, just, you know, be open to new ideas. It's a constant learning practice. Come in and get our walk through at Behrend, because it is the best place. You can look around and see if the grass is greener on the other side, but I guarantee you it's not. I mean, it is absolutely the place to be. You see Behrend, and you know, this is the place that you need to work at if you can. I mean, if you're given the opportunity, I would not refuse it. I wouldn't wanna work anywhere else. Other technicians look up to us, I think, and it's a very, very humbling thing too to to know that you're a Barron Heating technician.

My name is Carey Jefferson, and I am a senior service technician. I was working at Intelco and went through worker retraining program, and I figured that heating and air conditioning was gonna be a good field only because heating will likely be needed around here all the time. I would say what appealed most to me was the diverseness of the the field. Everything changes from day to day. It's never the same. We travel over multiple counties, and we work with multiple different pieces of equipment, furnaces to boilers to heat pumps, air conditioners. And so as you progress in the field, you you get more training and you get more confident in your field. Barron provides a lot of support through the people themselves, plus through schooling. They're constantly keeping up with technology and and bringing in other companies. They train us on some equipment that's coming out. They're constantly doing that to make sure that we have that knowledge base in the field. Once I got into the field, I had mentors that looked over me and taught me a lot of things about the field and were there to help me along the way. After you leave a school, not saying that BTC isn't a good school or anything, but you you still have that support system with you within the company. The four year schools and stuff like that are meant for certain people, other people they're not. If you like working with your hands and you like that customer relationship with people, if you like that kind of thing, then I can only say it. I I brings to mind about a story of a customer that I went to, hiked for about a mile in the snow to get to their house, and they had two little babies in a house that that hadn't been heated for a week and was able to get them going. I'm proud that I can be the best that I can be and and to take care of those people. And it gives me that feeling of proudness just to be able to do my job and to go home and and know that I fulfilled myself internally after a full day of work. I I've always wanted to serve people. And this job, that's constantly what you're doing. You're you're being a servant to your fellow being, basically, and that keeps me going from day to day to taking care of the people. Barron provides those things, tools, and and the chance to do those kind of things. I would never trade my path. I'm very proud to be a Barron technician.

My name is Josh Brooks. I am a an HVAC service tech with the company. I've been with Barron for fourteen years. It's gone really fast at times. The company has evolved and we've grown and we there's always something new. It's been pretty exciting. Pretty much my entire life growing up, I was always into the mechanical stuff and and in the shop and in the garage working with my dad. And, always admired the the fact that he could fix pretty much anything we had an issue with. Dad actually took me to to BTC and said, you know, like, let's go find out what you're interested in. So I was really lucky to have support from my parents to say, like, we we want you to find something you're interested in and and go for it and we'll support you. Barron does a lot of different things in the heating world. We do radiant floor heat, we do forced air, we do refrigeration, we do cooling. So there's always there's so many different avenues of the work that we do that attracted me. There was also a good team that was full of knowledge. I'm so glad that I've stayed around this company and I started here and I didn't choose a different path because I've been able to learn so many different things. We're always looking for the next thing or or trying to grow and learn as a company, as a team and that's hands down a huge positive because it's never gonna be boring. You get a lot of satisfaction out of going to a job, finding an issue with something, resolving it on-site and then moving on. Like it's it's a great feeling. A lot of positive feedback from a a hard worker, likes to troubleshoot problems, interested in how how mechanical things work, or, is always looking for the next, exciting thing is is it's what makes a good candidate for this career path in my opinion because things are always changing, evolving. Go on a roof one day, go on a crawl space the next. You're you're constantly moving around. We at times, we work a fair amount of a fair amount of hours, a lot of overtime. There's a lot of benefits to that and it sets up a lifestyle for me and my family and the kids and, I'm really grateful for that.

Most apprenticeship programs and trade schools run about two years for an AA degree. So our program is much faster. We're about fifteen weeks versus two years. You're gonna come in and you're gonna immediately be a part of a community. You're gonna build mentor relationships. You're gonna learn how to do the technical side of your job. You're gonna learn how to interact with our customers, and that's something that you're not gonna get going anywhere else. Probably the greatest thing about the Barron Technician School is the ability to get paid while you're in training and while you're learning a new trade. You are getting paid to learn. We provide all of the tools, all of the materials that you need to be able to be successful in school, as well as not have to pay tuition. You're actually getting paid an hourly wage to be there. I had thought about doing HVAC before, but but it wasn't something that was very feasible for me because I couldn't go to school and and work at the same time. So going to school and being paid, it's a huge benefit. It's something that I I wouldn't have been able to do without them. Students come into the school with really no knowledge of the industry whatsoever. So we take them through a number of modules. Twenty five percent of our our time is spent in textbooks. About seventy five percent of our time is actually spent in the labs with hands on tools. Barron Technician School has a state of the art lab that has twenty to thirty different pieces of equipment in it. We try to create real scenarios for them to experience and troubleshoot through and work their way through the problems just as if they were in the field. Barron has done a great job picking the instructors. Every one of them has has been in the field for a really long time and has truly experienced everything themselves. It means a lot to me to learn from somebody who's been in the field for so long. Having Dan Millspaugh as an instructor was an amazing opportunity. He's one of the brightest minds in the business, and he also has an amazing way of of teaching. After each one of the modules, we pair the students with our training technicians in the field. The stuff that they just learned, they get the opportunity to use, commits it to memory a lot better. You get to see exactly what you're gonna experience in a day to day work life as opposed to just a classroom setting. I get to have some real world experiences out in the field, which is something you wouldn't find anywhere else. We really have found that it's important for us to teach our technicians not only the technical components of their job, but also the soft skills. When we send people out into customers' homes, they're not robots. They need to be able to interact with customers and they need to be able to speak about what's important to the customer and not just what's important to the equipment. They'll need to be able to do a lot of interaction with an iPad, with a customer management system. And so our program really teaches to all those things. Being able to go to school with the people that you're gonna work with for years to come is an amazing opportunity because you get to, build those relationships not only professionally, but personally as well. The Barron Technician School is very unique in that I get to work with some of my coworkers before I even graduate. Our students are immediately plugged into that department that they're in, and they immediately start building those connections that they're gonna have well beyond school. Not only are they building relationships with each other, with our instructor, they're also building those future mentor relationships that they're gonna have even when the program's over and hopefully for the years to come as they continue to work for Behrend. It's not having to pay out of pocket for the schooling and and being paid while I go to school and have a job immediately after graduating has made it just that much easier to get into the trades. Why the Barron Technician School? Get paid to learn. All tools, textbooks, and materials are provided. Nationally recognized certifications, combine classroom experience with on the job training, learn soft skills, and build lasting relationships. It's gonna be a very rewarding career path. Congratulations, class of twenty twenty one.