Meet Algonquin College’s guide to the great outdoors
Posted on Thursday, March 29th, 2018
When Algonquin’s Outdoor Adventure diploma program was brand new, students like Ben Shillington would spend up to seven days a week in kayaks or canoes, on skis or trail bikes, in snow and on mountains, in rain and on rivers. However, it wasn’t this rigorous adventure training that would make Shillington “the world’s most extreme expedition guide,” as men’s lifestyle magazine Sharp recently dubbed him. It was everything else he learned at Algonquin, he says.
It was the communications courses, the business courses, the marketing courses, the classroom work that went along with all the paddling, biking and skiing that gave him an edge. It made it possible for Shillington to sell himself as a premiere guide – to invent his dream job.
“It’s not like you can graduate (from the Outdoor Adventure program at Algonquin’s Pembroke campus) and go find a nine-to-five,” Shillington says. “You’ve got to create your perfect career. And it’s like playing a game of chess, I always say . . . You’ve got to make the moves and anticipate how certain projects or gigs or relationships are going to lead to work in the future, and how you can sort of piggyback on that.”
The course’s classroom work didn’t seem onerous, Shillington recalls. “All that stuff was a lot easier to stay captivated with because you were pairing it with stuff you were doing in the field.”
Shillington had extensive experience in outdoor adventure before Algonquin College’s program even existed. He had been preparing himself for a career in guiding since he was in Grade 7, he says.
“I pretty much as much as I could on riding my bike, doing solo projects, being comfortable out in the cold, and basically taking on any outdoor pursuits that were available in a small town at that time,” he says. The Barry’s Bay, Ont. native taught himself how to rappel, for instance, by dropping off an abandoned railway bridge 30 metres above a creek bed.
“That progression took me right up through high school,” he says.
After high school, Shillington’s plan had been to ride his mountain bike, solo, to the west coast, pick up a B.C. raft guide license, and set about acquiring mountain climbing skills. Then, two months before he graduated, he got wind of a new program at Algonquin College. “A flyer came in with this potential program — it was still pending — and I thought if I can get into that and it goes, it would give me a good foot in the door.”
Since graduating, his profession has taken him to remote parts of 25 countries, up mountains as high as 7,000 metres from the Rockies to the Himalayas, and to the Canadian Arctic. He leads tours, guides film companies, and trains the next generation of guides. He is now a field instructor with the Outdoor Adventure program.
“I’d say there’s nothing to lose (for students) coming into these programs, whether you intend to be a guide or work in the industry or not. There are so many transferable skills…organization, communications, self-sufficiency, networking, entrepreneurial kinds of skills, whether you’re going to the manager of warehouse, a police officer or what have you,” he says.
“What you put into it is what you’re going to get out of it.”