He was once an HBI student. Now he’s helping others start their plumbing careers.
At 23, John Gallagher wasn’t sure where to go. He had dropped out of high school because he didn’t find traditional schooling engaging, but he couldn’t break out of minimum wage jobs because he didn’t have a diploma. He didn’t even have a driver’s license.
In 1989, he joined Job Corps, a government-run residential education and job training program for young adults ages 16-24, after a friend who was enrolled in the program told him about it. He initially intended to learn tile setting at Job Corps, but after an orientation teacher encouraged him to look at the Home Builders Institute (HBI) programs — which are offered at Job Corps locations — before committing to tile setting, Gallagher joined the solar program at HBI instead.
The program at the time involved working on hot water systems and soldering copper, which Gallagher found compelling. This led to his interest in a plumbing career.
In 1990, he graduated from HBI, finished high school and got his driver’s license – all within 6 months. Then he went on to get his associate degree in construction technology while at Job Corps, which helped him understand how plumbing fit into the building process.
Then, he set his sights on becoming a plumber, and his experience at HBI helped him secure his first job.
“I found that the HBI graduate and hands-on training was more interesting to the [hiring] contractor than college degree, and that's the first time I had heard that,” he said.
Gallagher worked for All Clear Drain Cleaning and Leak Detection, a small family business, for 8 years, working his way up to work alongside the owner. Eventually, Gallagher got his contractor's license and opened Gallagher Plumbing in 2003.
Then in 1998, he got a call from his former instructor who asked if he wanted to come back to HBI as an instructor for the solar program at San Diego Job Corps.
“I realized that passing my information on to the next generation of students was a lot more rewarding than basically just making money out of plumbing company,” Gallagher said.
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He transitioned into teaching the skilled trades, and after two years, the program transitioned to an electrical and plumbing program, and Gallagher built the new program from scratch.
He built modules of live training stations that mimicked the plumbing work he did in the field — drain cleaning, in-slab leak repair, and all the basic lessons for service plumbers. He gave students some of the most complex situations they could face in the field so they would leave the program ready for anything.
Getting students engaged in the trade is a big part of his work as an instructor. A lot of students who join HBI come from tough backgrounds, from poverty to homelessness.
“We want to catch someone at that stage, light a fire underneath them and give them a career,” Gallagher said.
As Job Corps’ regional career development coordinator for the Southwest who has built multiple skilled trade programs from scratch, Gallagher said the key to engaging students and potentially shifting the course of their lives is finding what piques their interest through hands-on learning. For him, it was soldering pipe. For others, it may be drain cleaning or leak repair.
“The light bulb goes on and that's the magic,” he said.
Once Gallagher finds what excites students, he’ll work on getting them paired up with a business for a short internship after they get their high school diploma and license. Often, the company hires students after the internship.
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He’s had students become plumbers in the U.S. Navy. Others have gone on to own their own businesses and come back to hire HBI students. It’s seeing these successes that drives home the importance of his work.
“I like it,” he said, “because we're changing people's lives.”
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