From Classroom to Career | Cameron Barber

When Cameron Barber, ​23, first stepped into a tech career, he didn’t arrive with a typical résumé. With an academic background in psychology, he found himself at a crossroads common to many post-secondary graduates: How to turn academic learning into meaningful work experience. His answer: work-integrated learning.  

ICTC's Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Digital program provides wage subsidies to employers across Canada’s critical sectors, helping post-secondary students gain meaningful paid work experience through opportunities like co-op placements while still in school. For Cameron, the opportunity provided a structured bridge between education and employment that would ultimately transform the trajectory of his career.

His journey began as a co-op placement with Solace — an Ottawa-based data-streaming provider — facilitated through Algonquin College and coordinated by ICTC. “From what I’d heard, co-op is essentially required to break into the tech workforce,” Cameron explains. “It felt like the most impactful thing I could do, so I focused on that right away.”

Sharper, Higher, Faster, Stronger  

One of the biggest adjustments Cameron faced was the shift from academic expectations to workplace realities. In school, he explains, it was often possible to succeed without fully mastering every concept. That changed quickly in a professional co-op setting.

“I had to adopt new strategies for learning at much higher speeds,” Cameron says. “In an academic environment, you can sometimes get away with knowing 80 percent of something. In the workplace, you need to practice until it becomes second nature. It’s less about passing grades and more like getting A-pluses on everything.”

That mindset shift forced Cameron to rethink how he approached learning. The pace was faster, expectations were higher, and outcomes mattered more than processes. While that pressure was challenging at first, it ultimately sharpened the problem-solving skills he had developed at Algonquin, and helped him build confidence in his ability to deliver real results — an adjustment he says school alone could not have prepared him for.

Support + Structure = Confidence

At Solace, mentorship was readily available, and the most meaningful training required mastering concepts before moving forward. “Without that structure, I don’t think I would have understood the systems nearly as well,” Cameron says.

The culture also mattered. Solace treats its co-op program as a genuine talent pipeline, and Cameron quickly noticed that many full-time employees had started exactly where he was. Motivated by that example, he worked hard and enthusiastically to show his employer he wanted to stay. “When the full-time job offer came, it was incredibly affirming.”  

Today, Cameron works as a Technical Customer Support Engineer and is exploring future paths in project management or development operations (DevOps). More importantly, he carries forward a renewed belief in effort and opportunity. “In school, it’s easy to feel like hard work doesn’t matter all that much,” he reflects. “This experience showed me that it does.”

Cameron’s journey illustrates what work-integrated learning can do when it’s done right: give students confidence, employers capable talent, and both sides a clearer path forward.

About ICTC’s WIL Digital Program

ICTC’s Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Digital program provides eligible Canadian employers with grants to subsidize up to 50 percent of a student’s salary over their term. The program takes place over three terms a year: Winter, Spring/Summer, and Fall. Since 2017, it has facilitated over 23,000 student placements with more than 4,000 employers across Canada, and over 65 percent of placed students identifying as belonging to underrepresented groups.

ICTC’s Work-Integrated Learning (WIL) Digital program is funded by the Government of Canada's Student Work Placement Program (SWPP).

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