New IMI National Training Director Brings Strong Experience

JOURNAL: ISSUE 4 - 2012

Bob Arnold, IMI National Director of Apprenticeship and Training, only began his tenure in August at the national level but his previous experience running Chicago's District Council Training Center, one of the largest in the country, had him well-prepared to hit the ground running in his new job.

 "Chicago's training program with multiple crafts and all types of construction markets from residential to commercial to industrial is really a microcosm of our national training needs," said BAC President James Boland. "Bob's experience developing programs to address those needs as well as his own personal experience working in the trade at various levels really gives us the best of all worlds."

Arnold has been a bricklayer member of Local 21 Illinois since 1978, and began his career working on multi-family apartment complexes, commercial and industrial structural masonry. He worked in refractory in the early 1980s on coke batteries, blast furnaces, and glass tanks, etc., and held his first foreman job at age 23. In the mid '80s, he went into partnership as a small mason contractor doing residential and small commercial projects. He then returned to refractory in the early 1990s, as a foreman, general foreman and superintendent.

In 1999, he became a Job Corps instructor, and a year later, a masonry instructor for Local 21. He took over as director of the District Council Training Center in 2001 and held that position until this past August. Arnold is also a voting member of ASTM C12, C15 and C18.