When I talked to the 350 folks at 60th REPC in Denver about finding new engineers, it dawned on me we need to demonstrate to engineering students the camaraderie as well as the calculations.
How many of us knew when we were juniors in college that we would be in the utility industry? (Those of you with an elder relative in the industry, like my son, don’t count).
How do we attract the rest of the students, parents and faculty who are among the consumers that only notice the negative about our industry. They take us for granted 99.85% of the time. But when the power is off 0.15% of the time (median utility according to IEEE reliability survey of 215 utilities), or we pollute the air, or we build ugly facilities In their backyard, they look at us with stink eye.
Who wants to be part of that? I was at Distributech talking with a silver-haired long-time colleague and two young engineers. The kids heard me say “It’s a great industry with very few a**holes” And my buddy added “and we all know who they are!”
