Why Your Next HVAC Technician Might Come from Telecom
The building automation industry has a talent crisis. The answer might already be working in a different sector.
David Gellad
April 2026
A building owner calls for help with their HVAC system. The chiller in their commercial property is cycling erratically, temperatures are drifting across floors, and tenants are complaining. They call a service company. The technician who shows up spent the last decade in telecom.
And that technician is exactly the right person for the job. Because the problem isn’t mechanical. The compressor is fine. The refrigerant charge is fine. The issue is a BACnet communication failure between the chiller controller and the building automation system. Data packets are dropping. The supervisory controller can’t read the chiller’s status, so it keeps sending conflicting commands. It’s a network problem wearing an HVAC mask.
This scenario isn’t hypothetical. It’s the kind of thing I see regularly, and it points to something much bigger than one service call. The building automation industry is experiencing a convergence that is quietly rewriting the rules. HVAC, IT, and telecom are collapsing into a single integrated discipline — and the industry isn’t ready for what that means for its workforce.
The Talent Crisis Nobody’s Solving
Let’s start with the numbers, because the numbers are stark.
Approximately 700,000 of Canada’s four million skilled tradespeople are set to retire by 2028, according to BuildForce Canada and the federal government’s own workforce projections. In Ontario alone, at least one-third of tradespeople and apprentices are 55 or older. These aren’t distant forecasts — we’re two years away, and the pipeline of replacements isn’t close to ready.
A CIBC Economics report identified no fewer than 80,000 vacancies across Canada’s construction sector, with the vacancy rate hitting record highs. And the ripple effects extend well beyond construction. The Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters found that labour shortages cost the Canadian economy an estimated $13 billion in 2022 alone — nearly two-thirds of manufacturers surveyed had lost or turned down contracts because they simply couldn’t find workers.
But here’s what makes the building automation space uniquely vulnerable: it’s not just losing bodies. It’s losing institutional knowledge. And the people coming in to replace retirees need a completely different skill set than the ones leaving.
Marc Petock, a respected voice in building automation and Vice President at Lynxspring, put it plainly in an April 2026 LinkedIn post. He wrote that one of the biggest barriers in building automation is that talented people outside the industry simply don’t know it exists. They don’t understand how dynamic or valuable it is. The result, he said, is that companies are “fishing in the same small talent pond” instead of expanding awareness to new audiences.
That observation cuts to the heart of the problem. The industry isn’t just short on workers — it’s short on imagination about where to find them.
Buildings Don’t Just Need Mechanics Anymore
If the talent crisis were simply about replacing retiring HVAC technicians with younger versions of the same, the path forward would be straightforward. Train more people in refrigeration cycles and ductwork. But that’s not what’s happening. The buildings themselves have changed.
The global building automation system market is projected to grow from $101 billion in 2025 to $191 billion by 2030, a compound annual growth rate of 13.4%, according to MarketsandMarkets. Meanwhile, artificial intelligence in smart buildings and infrastructure is expected to grow from $41.4 billion in 2024 to roughly $359 billion by 2034. These aren’t incremental shifts. This is an industry being fundamentally restructured by technology.
AutomatedBuildings.com captured this moment in a 2025 editorial titled “The Great Convergence,” which described how HVAC, IT, cybersecurity, and sustainability are collapsing into a single integrated reality. The message to technicians was blunt: “Your multimeter won’t debug a Kubernetes cluster.” The piece called for a radical reinvention of every role in the BAS ecosystem, from technicians to facility managers to vendors.
Think about what a modern building automation technician actually needs to know. IP networking and subnetting. BACnet/IP and Modbus protocols. Cybersecurity fundamentals — because connected building systems are now attack surfaces. Data analytics, because every sensor generates data that needs to be interpreted. Cloud platforms, because supervisory control is moving off-premise. And increasingly, scripting and programming, because configuring a modern BAS involves writing logic, not just turning dials.
Right here in Montreal, Trane Technologies — which acquired Montreal-based BrainBox AI — is hiring HVAC Engineering Associates whose job descriptions read like hybrid IT/telecom/HVAC roles. They’re looking for people who can handle BAS commissioning, AI-driven control logic, Python scripting, sensor diagnostics, and communication protocol troubleshooting. Five years ago, that job description would have been incomprehensible to most HVAC contractors. Today, it’s becoming the norm.
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The skill set that buildings demand has shifted under everyone’s feet. And the question is: where do you find people who already have these capabilities?
What Telecom Professionals Actually Bring to the Table
This is where it gets personal for me.
I spent years managing telecom infrastructure projects — coordinating network rollouts, troubleshooting protocol failures, integrating systems across multiple sites. When I pivoted to building automation and HVAC, I didn’t start from zero. I brought a toolkit the industry desperately needs. And I’ve come to believe that my path isn’t unusual — it should be a model.
Consider what a telecom engineer or project manager actually does day-to-day. They live inside IP networks. They understand routing, switching, VLANs, subnetting, and protocol stacks at a foundational level. BACnet/IP — the dominant protocol in building automation — runs on exactly this infrastructure. When a BAS network isn’t communicating properly, the troubleshooting methodology is identical to diagnosing a telecom network issue: isolate the physical layer, check the network layer, then work up to the application layer. That systematic, layered approach to problem-solving is second nature in telecom. In building automation, it’s still a rare and valuable skill.
Then there’s project management at scale. Telecom deployments routinely coordinate massive rollouts across dozens or hundreds of sites, managing vendors, timelines, commissioning, and handoffs. Multi-building BAS integration projects have exactly the same complexity profile. The discipline of managing scope, coordinating trades, and delivering on schedule doesn’t change just because you’re connecting chillers instead of cell towers.
Systems thinking is another area where the overlap is almost perfect. In telecom, you learn very quickly that complex interconnected systems fail in cascading ways. One misconfigured switch can take down a region. Buildings are becoming the same kind of interconnected ecosystem — where a network failure in one subsystem affects HVAC, lighting, access control, and fire safety simultaneously. Telecom professionals are trained to think about these dependencies. Most traditional HVAC technicians were never asked to.
And then there’s data. Telecom has been a data-driven industry for decades — monitoring network performance, analyzing traffic patterns, predicting capacity needs. Building automation is only now catching up to that reality, with the explosion of sensor data, energy analytics, and AI-driven optimization. The analytical mindset that telecom cultivates is precisely what smart buildings need.
The Industry Needs to Widen the Lens
To his credit, Petock also pointed to encouraging signs. He noted that forward-thinking firms are already reskilling their existing workforce — turning HVAC technicians into controls specialists, training installers to become commissioning experts, and developing service personnel into analytics and integration roles. That internal upskilling is essential, and it’s happening.
But the reverse path — bringing telecom and IT professionals into building automation — is equally viable and dramatically underexplored. These aren’t people who need to be taught networking or data analysis or systems integration. They already know those things. What they need is domain-specific knowledge: mechanical system fundamentals, BAS platform training, and an understanding of building codes and standards. That gap is real, but it’s narrower than most people assume.
The institutional infrastructure for this crossover is already emerging. BICSI — an organization with deep roots in telecommunications infrastructure — now publishes ANSI/BICSI 007, a comprehensive standard for ICT design and implementation in intelligent buildings. It covers everything from building automation systems to energy management to low-voltage lighting, and it explicitly bridges the telecom and smart building worlds. The convergence isn’t just something people are writing about on LinkedIn. It’s being formalized in industry standards.
What’s also emerging is a new professional archetype: the Intelligent Building Consultant. This is someone who bridges mechanical systems, IT infrastructure, and data analytics. They understand the compressor and the protocol. They can read a piping diagram and a network topology. They don’t fit neatly into the HVAC bucket or the IT bucket — and that’s exactly the point. The most valuable person in a modern building project is the one who can work across those silos rather than being trapped inside one.
The industry hasn’t fully recognized this role yet. Job titles are still catching up. Training programs are still catching up. But the work is already here, and the people best positioned to do it often come from backgrounds the building automation industry has never thought to recruit from.
A Call to Action
I’m writing this for three audiences, because this problem needs all three to move at once.
To building owners and facility managers: The next time your building system fails, don’t automatically assume you need a traditional HVAC company. Ask what the actual problem is. If it’s a communication protocol issue, a network integration failure, or a data analytics question, you may need someone who understands networks and systems as well as they understand mechanical systems. Those people exist. Start asking for them.
To HVAC and building automation companies: Start recruiting from telecom and IT. Seriously. Post your job openings in places where network engineers and IT project managers will see them. Partner with telecom training programs. Stop assuming that the only path into building automation runs through a refrigeration apprenticeship. The talent pool you need is already trained — they just don’t know your industry exists yet. That’s a marketing problem, not a talent problem.
To telecom and IT professionals who are looking for what’s next: The building automation industry needs what you know. It needs your networking expertise, your project management discipline, your systems thinking, and your comfort with data. The barriers to entry are lower than you think. The mechanical knowledge you’ll need to pick up is learnable. The technology skills you already have are the ones the industry can’t train fast enough. And the work is meaningful — you’ll be making buildings more efficient, more sustainable, and more responsive to the people inside them.
The smartest buildings of 2030 won’t be built by one discipline alone. They’ll be built by people who think across silos — who understand the compressor and the protocol, the ductwork and the data. The convergence isn’t coming. It’s here. The only question is whether we’ll build a workforce that can meet it.
David Gellad is a Montreal-based multidisciplinary technologist whose career spans telecom subject matter expertise, HVAC systems, and electrical diagnostics. He is building a practice at the intersection of building automation, systems integration, and digital intelligence — and writes about what happens when these worlds collide.
