Todd Barnett builds futures with PCC mobile welding training

Published 2:15 am Saturday, March 15, 2025

(PORTLAND) — Todd Barnett remembers his first exposure to welding growing up watching his dad work on forestry equipment.

Now, he’s gone full circle, helping students enter the trade. 

Barnett helped create Portland Community College’s Mobile Welding Outreach and Training Center, and has worked to help students succeed in the industry for more than a decade. 

Helping people has always been an “underlying current” in his life. 

Barnett was raised in southern Oregon and was involved in the forestry industry since he was a child. He moved up to the Portland area in the early 2000s. 

“It’s been a while, so I’m a Portlander,” Barnett said laughing. “I’m a transplant.” 

In 2008, he was hired by Vigor Industrial which was helping set up PCC’s program. At the time, Barnett worked underneath the head instructor, building all of the booths, installing wiring and putting in the grids and structure of the lab. 

The program started as a converted trailer that he took to high schools, reservations and other underserved communities as a way to encourage engagement in the trade. 

“We got ‘er done,” he said. 

For pennies on the dollar, he found a scrapped mobile testing platform, refurbished it and put it to use. The mobile unit used today is the same one he first converted. 

Barnett said he worked himself into the position of maritime welding instructor and was officially hired as an assistant in 2011. He became a full-time instructor in 2016. 

At his start at PCC, working as the right-hand-man to the head instructor, Barnett got to meet people from around the world who peaked his interest in the welding industry further. 

“You can communicate welding without having to know the language,” Barnett said. “You can get to know a person through welding.”

He described himself as a platypus, juggling jobs at both PCC and Vigor Industrial, while developing his welding knowledge. One hired fulltime at PCC, Barnett also became, and still is, the president of the Boilermakers 104 Local union. 

“That helps me help students with their journey into employment,” Barnett said. “What’s really my caveat is helping second chance individuals and seeing how they change their lives around.”

Barnett said in his years instructing, he’s seen an approximate of 200 formerly incarcerated people, or more, make their way through the maritime welding program. 

“Some of these big, tough guys come up to me and they get teared up after they changed their lives around and reestablished connections with loved ones they thought they’d never have again,” Barnett said.

Many of these students have since written Barnett letters expressing their gratitude. 

A section of one read, “Having spent the last 10 years incarcerated, I was extremely worried about my transition to a normal life…Todd Barnett has been amazing.  He has been a knowledgeable resource and gone above and beyond to help me in my personal and professional growth.”

Barnett said he has many of these letters that share the same sentiments. 

“These are the things I hold dear to my heart,” he said. “That’s where my paycheck is.” 

Changing the world one person at a time is what Barnett believes is the most effective way to make progress. He believes it’s like a ripple effect: one person changes, then two, then the whole neighborhood, then the city and so on.  

“My younger self probably would’ve though I’d always be in the forest with a chainsaw,” Barnett said. “Now, he’d go, ‘What are you doing working on the computer logging grades? But my younger self would be proud of me.'” 

And he knows his five sons are proud of him. Three of them are welders. 

“I just hope that education makes a difference in our world and society gets better from it,” Barnett said. “Strive for a better world through education. That’s what I’m hoping on.” 

Community: Portland 

Why he is an Amazing Educator: He strives to better the world, one person at a time, through education. 

“I just hope that education makes a difference in our world and society gets better from it. Strive for a better world through education. That’s what I’m hoping on.”

— Todd Barnett

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