at HiMark.
Life just doesn’t always follow the set plan. With no intentions of following in his father’s footsteps, Bill Moore expected to find himself working as an electrician in his career. But it just worked out that there was an opening for a refrigeration apprentice, so he signed on. The rest is history. This was back in the 1970s. Since then, he has found himself working in several aspects of the trades, including on the tools, as a supervisor, service manager, and now as a semi-retired journeyperson, he has put on his trainers hat.
“It’s been fun. There have been plenty of opportunities in this trade for me,” explains Moore. “I just thoroughly enjoyed it, working on the tools, working with my hands, to being a supervisor, to actually designing projects and managing them. It’s been a pretty awesome opportunity for me in our industry.”
Although Moore took on plenty of different roles in his career, he states that his favourite has to be projects. “I like going and being a problem solver for people. I wore a service hat and that was fun, but my favourite was getting projects and implementing a solution for a customer. Seeing a project from start to finish and seeing the success of it. Another part of it that I loved was just encouraging young guys to get into the trades and watching them grow and learn.”
He took on many different apprentices over his career, with more of them sticking to the trades than not. “I took guys on from high school, we did co-op programs through schools,” explains Moore. His son, Nathan Moore, was even one of the apprentices he took on and the individual to nominate Bill Moore for our Industry Champions series.
Of the apprentices that Moore has worked with over the years, there are countless technicians still in the trade that will reach out to Moore for advice on a job. Now that Moore is semi-retired, he still wants to give back to the trades and as such operates a consulting business where he works with technicians and also trains through HiMark at their Rexdale and Barrie locations.
HiMark offers gasfitter, refrigeration and air conditioning, HVAC, safety, pre-exam courses. According to Moore, they are best known for their gas training courses as it is TSSA-approved. He admits that he could go fully-retired, but he has such a continued passion for teaching. “It’s a great opportunity to inject into the trade some of the things that I’ve learned over the last 47 years,” explains Moore. “It’s nice to be able to inject some of those opportunities to be able to just teach them how to do certain things of the trade that are unique or maybe just they didn’t pick up basic.” Currently Moore teaches the 313D certification course for residential air conditioning mechanic and the pre-exam course for also 313A certification for refrigeration and air conditioning systems mechanic.
When asked what pieces of advice he gives to those entering the trades, he stressed the importance that continual training will have on their career.
“There’s a lot of learning opportunities outside of the day-to-day routines — talk to suppliers and keep taking courses whenever you can,” said Moore. “Even after you are licensed and certified by the government, that’s just when the learning starts. I had an uncle that told me once when I was just starting the trade, he said, “That drinking fountain outside the manager’s office is just as important to him as the chiller that runs the plant. We got to fix both. You got to be able to be diversified to be able to do as much as you can for your customers.” The more licenses and more training are very, very important.”
Moore takes pride in every teaching moment he has with his students and doesn’t believe in mediocracy. If a technician doesn’t know an answer to a problem, this just present itself as another learning opportunity to grow, explains Moore.