Five reasons electric co-ops are great places to work

by Paul Wess­lund

Run­ning elec­tric util­i­ties today takes just about every skill imag­in­able. Some jobs call for the phys­i­cal abil­i­ty to climb a util­i­ty pole, the tech­ni­cal know- how to cre­ate intri­cate cyber­se­cu­ri­ty sys­tems and inter­per­son­al skills of talk­ing with a co-op mem­ber about how they can low­er their elec­tric bill, while oth­ers require the logis­ti­cal knowl­edge to get essen­tial equip­ment deliv­ered through a chal­leng­ing sup­ply chain.

To high­light this unique indus­try and the many career paths it offers, here are five ways the unique char­ac­ter­is­tics of elec­tric co-ops make them a great place to work:

1. Sta­bil­i­ty. You can count on homes and busi­ness­es need­ing elec­tric­i­ty now and in the future. One analy­sis pre­dicts elec­tric­i­ty demand will grow even faster in the 2020s than it has the pre­vi­ous two decades. Ener­gy careers offer excel­lent ben­e­fits and paths for career advance­ment. Employ­ees typ­i­cal­ly stay in the indus­try more than 15 years.

2. Excite­ment. While util­i­ty work is reli­able, it’s also at the cut­ting-edge of inno­va­tion. Elec­tri­fi­ca­tion is the cen­ter­piece of the push for green­er ener­gy. The num­ber of elec­tric vehi- cles is dou­bling every year, which means new work­force skills are need­ed to fig­ure out how to keep all those vehi­cles plugged in and charged up. More than $120 bil­lion a year is being spent to mod­ern­ize the U.S. elec­tric grid to man­age new pat­terns of elec­tric­i­ty use. The ener­gy indus­try is chang­ing, and it’s an excit­ing time to be part of it.

3. Vari­ety. The skills need­ed in the util­i­ty indus­try range from advanced col­lege degrees to trade school, appren­tice­ship and on-the-job train­ing. And the range of posi­tions is staggering—accountants, social media man­agers, IT spe­cial­ists, engi­neers, human resources pro­fes­sion­als. There are more unique posi­tions as well, such as drone oper­a­tors who inspect pow­er lines, data ana­lysts who coor­di­nate the flow of elec­tric­i­ty and pow­er plant oper­a­tors who over­see elec­tric­i­ty gen­er­a­tion.

4. It’s local. The thing about elec­tric­i­ty is that main­tain­ing the ser­vice needs to hap­pen near­by. That means that much of the work takes place near your home­town. Not only can a util­i­ty work­er make a liv­ing and raise a fam­i­ly in the place they choose to live, but if they decide to move to anoth­er part of the coun­try, there will like­ly be ener­gy career oppor­tu­ni­ties there as well.

5. Sat­is­fac­tion. Any linework­er will tell you there’s no bet­ter feel­ing than know­ing the pow­er out­age you’ve just restored brought light and heat back into the homes of hun­dreds of peo­ple. The same goes for the util­i­ty truck dis­patch­er back at head­quar­ters and the media spe­cial­ist get­ting the word out about the sta­tus of pow­er restora­tion, as well as the sys­tem resilience plan­ners who are work­ing to avoid an out­age in the first place, and the engi­neers who are cre­at­ing an ener­gy sys­tem for the future with renew­able ener­gy tech­nolo­gies and util­i­ty-scale bat­ter­ies.

Elec­tric co-ops offer a unique busi­ness mod­el that’s led by the mem­bers who use the electricity—that’s you. It’s a form of busi­ness with a com­mit­ment to improv­ing the qual­i­ty of life for the local com­mu­ni­ty, which can call for jobs like part­ner­ing with local groups to bring broad­band to rur­al areas, or work that’s as essen­tial and pro­found as keep­ing the lights on.

Paul Wess­lund writes on con­sumer and coop­er­a­tive affairs for the Nation­al Rur­al Elec­tric Coop­er­a­tive Asso­ci­a­tion. From grow­ing sub­urbs to remote farm­ing com­mu­ni­ties, elec­tric co-ops serve as engines of eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment for 42 mil­lion Amer­i­cans across 56% of the nation’s land­scape.