 Hi everybody. My name is Jason Klein. I'm the Director of P20 Initiatives at Northern Illinois University and we're back with another episode of Career Pathways Virtual Trail Heads. Today we're real excited. We've got an electrician. You've heard about electricians in a number of previous episodes. It is an incredibly important occupation in our society, both with the emphasis on alternative energy and with how we all work today. I mean the amount of electricity we all need to use to work remotely is incredibly and makes it so incredibly important. So Jeff, I'm going to turn it over to you to introduce yourself. Hello, my name is Jeff Karger. I'm the owner of A&J Electric here in Sycamore, Illinois. So Jeff, first of all, tell us about what a typical day or week looks like in your job. Well, that's why I like my job is because there is no typical day. I mean, I might be roughing in a new construction residential house today. Tomorrow I might be piping a basement or we do service work. So just Friday we went over and hung a $22,000 foyer light for a customer of ours, but she didn't tell me it was that expensive when we first started. So yeah, so every day is a little different and I like the challenge. That's very cool. So what is what is like the most interesting or exciting aspects of the work that we might not know about? It's the challenge of the new codes coming in. You have to stay current. It's a lot of continuing ed, but what I like about the continuing ed side of things is that everything is going towards safety. So when I first started off, it was just get it done and not worry about it. We'll patch up with electrical tape later, you know. And now it's coming full circle and we're actually putting guys in PPE and we're safe and OSHA requirements. So it's a good trade to be into. So let's stick with that continuing ed and the focus on safety for a second. How many days, hours, what does the ongoing training look like for you on an annual basis in your work? Well, in Illinois, it's not mandatory that we take. I take it upon myself to educate myself on the new codes that are coming up like we just went from 2011 code to 2014 code, which is a big jump and there's some areas that we're still doing 2005, which is even a more incredible job. But when you're doing work in many different counties and many different codes and many different cities, you have to stay on top of these things so that you're ahead of the curve rather than having to rework something after you thought it was it was this way and not that way. So but there's a lot of places around the United States, though, that do require, you know, up to 15 to 20 hours a year of continuing ed. And then how do you how do you go about and find like what does the continuing ed look like for you? Do you just sit and watch a YouTube video? Do you have to sign up for a class at a community college? I take I'll take I'll take classes like online classes. Mike Holt has some really nice ones. He's in Florida, but he does a lot of online. He has an online presence. There's YouTube is also great. I always joke with the younger kids because if they can't figure something out, they'll pull up YouTube, you know, it's the new apprenticeship. So but yeah, it's you have to you have to source it out and find what you need. And it's out there. You just got to find it. Tell us about what what is kind of the most exciting job you've worked on or unique job you've worked on that you think could capture our imagination a little bit about electrical work? Well, we the company I worked for about 15 years ago renovated Soldier Field. So that was as a Bears, you know, Bears fan that was that's pretty amazing to say, Hey, I was part of this, you know, and then the skyscrapers downtown, I would get dragged down to Chicago sometimes to fill some spills, for people that were missing. And so it's everything that you go around is is amazing, like the Walgreen estate in Dixon, Illinois. That's where I'm from. When I was an apprentice, I got to go out there and rework a lot of the areas. We had to pipe the basement. There's an underground basketball court there. The wine cellar had a key that only Mr. Walgreen had, and he had to fly into Chicago and have a limo take him out to the estate to open up that so I could actually wire the wine cellar. So you never know what you're going to get yourself into. Well, they're right there and just a short answer. You've given us a few super interesting projects and yeah, that's that is that is very, very cool. Tell us about kind of on a day to day basis beyond. So obviously, there's a set of skills, a set of knowledge you have to have around electrical work, what to do what not to do so no one gets hurt so that you hit the light switch and and it turns on the lights. But what other skills are necessary to be successful in your work? Well, when you first start off, it's the basic tools, basic tools on a lot of the kids I get. Unfortunately, they didn't have the Woods class and electrical class and they're kind of phasing that out in the schools. So now you're teaching somebody how to use a hammer now or how to cut something properly and how to use a hacksaw properly. So and then and that's just the hand tools. That's not counting the power tools that you would, you know, you use on a daily basis. So you're actually educating, you know, the 20 year olds and the 21 year olds, you know, how to properly screw something in or or drill a hole properly. So it's it's a little frustrating at times, but it is part of it's part of the process. Are there other skills that are important kind of those skills that that might be important in a lot of careers that you would want a student watching this to know like, hey, you got to be and this is kind of an obvious one, but but it's maybe good for people here, but you got to be on time for work or you got what are the kind of other skills that students would need to have as they step into wanting to be an electrician? The first thing I look for is work ethics. I look for somebody that shows up on time. And then my famous saying is if you're on time, you're still late. So if they show up a little bit earlier, I notice that if they're asking questions, you know, there is there is no wrong question to ask. And then I know that they're they're actually trying to learn. And so it's it's one of those things where it's not something that they have to come in with a certain set of skills. They just got to have the basic skills that want to learn, you know. So almost if I if I took a sports analogy, I'm looking for you to say yes or no. And if it's no, correct me here, but you're looking for someone who's real coachable to them, right? Correct. Yes. Okay, great. So beyond high school, if I let's say I'm a 17 year old watching this. I'm a junior in high school. I don't know what senior year is going to look like as we record this right now. But I know I want to be an electrician. For example, what should I be planning to do after I graduate from high school? Like what are my next steps and and what recommendations would you have for what I do during my last 15 months now or 12 months before I do graduate? Well, what they should be doing is sourcing out what what direction they want to go if they want to go into it. You have to go into an apprenticeship. So either going to you're either going to go into the IBEW, which is the union apprenticeship, or you're going to go into like an ABC program, which is also an apprenticeship, but just the non union version of that. And I've been through both of those schools. So they're four and five year programs. And you're going to learn a lot, but you're going to learn about 80% on the job training. So what they'll do is they'll go maybe a couple nights a week to these these classroom situations and learn the actual criteria that's probably in both sides of the court there and then and then use that. And then there's supposed to be asking questions to the journeymen and the older guys that are on them asking them about this, if they don't understand something. And it's the journeyman's responsibility to actually teach those apprentices and keep them safe. But they're going to they're going to learn most of their work in the field. I have a first year apprentice that just started ABC program. And he he complained the first three, four weeks. It was just so boring because it's about safety. And it's about this and that, you know, and then he said he started talking to everybody around him and he was like the smartest kid in the because they don't know how to bend pipe, they didn't know how to run Romax and he's been doing all that stuff from day one. So so yeah, it's you have to look at the apprenticeship just like you would look at the college take it on seriously show up do your homework. Don't just, you know, fumble through it and hope for the best at the end, you know, put your best up for forward. So you use some really important words there. You use the word apprentice use the word journeyman. Can you talk us through what what kind of those mean and what that ladder looks like a little bit? Yeah, so a journeyman will start off and he can either have some information and a little bit of background. Maybe he worked for somebody in the past on the weekends, but he's going to show up and he's going to he's going to start the program along with everybody else at the same point. Nobody gets pushed ahead just because they have a little knowledge. These are these are government mandated programs that they're going through. So when they start there, they're going to start on the easy stuff, work them work their way up to the like whatever the protocol is. Like and if you're in Chicago, you're not learning Romax. Romax is the, you know, nm cable. Everything is going to be metal because that's that's that area. So out here we have both so they're teaching both. So what they'll do is they'll start off with how to properly drill holes. What's the code of behind that? You know, and why do we drill the holes where we drilled them? And then they'll work their way up once they they've passed all these modules, then they'll be in the second year. Second year, you're going to learn third year, then you get into fourth year. Now you're into programmable controllers, you're into ladder logic, you know, the stuff they're going to take you from you get at the end of this so that you can either do Romax, you can do commercial, you can do industrial, you're well rounded. And that's what we want because nobody knows where they're going to end up. The journeymen now they started off just like the apprentices, but now they're like the teachers in the field. They stand back and they dictate where the apprentices are going to work and what the projects that are supposed to be working on. And that's going to be coordinated with their skill set. Cool. That's that's fantastic. It's really interesting. I think one of the takeaways for students who might be in schools or classrooms where they're watching a bunch of these different videos is really no matter what someone thinks they want to do career wise. When they're done with high school, they're not done with formal or informal learning either way. You're looking at a bunch more years of formal learning and ongoing informal learning like you'd said at the beginning of this, if you want to stay up to date. So what do you think the job prospects are looking like? Would you say for an electrician in Northern Illinois, Chicagoland, that kind of thing as we look towards the future for young people? Well, if you follow the news, trades are drastically needing personnel. The older guys are retiring. After that 2005 recession, a lot of them sourced out other jobs and never came back. So we're really hurting for people. And so I say that anybody that walks in and wants a job, they're going to get a job. They're going to get exactly what they need. When I went in, it was like you had to apply. It's not like that anymore. There's such a need. There's jobs out there, we just can't fill. Cool. So for the young person who is coachable and highly motivated, those things we talked about a few minutes ago and interested in this, there's a pretty good career pathway for them, pretty strong set of opportunities. So what do you love most about your job? I get to see different people every day. It's not one of those jobs where I show up at 7, leave at 3, and I do the same thing all day long. Everything is pre-planned a week ahead of time, it's scheduled, but I might be piping, I might be Romexing, trimming, repairing, going out and having to use my brain and troubleshoot. So it's just fun to do. And then at the end of the day, when the project is done and you throw the breaker on and this works and this lights, it's like a sense of accomplishment. So I'm glad you brought that up because I was actually thinking about that earlier as you were talking. I was thinking one of the cool things about your job is kind of built into it, is there is a sense of accomplishment on a pretty regular basis. You do this hard work, you apply your knowledge, and you can actually see it come together. And I think about the work I do now that's not always the case, you don't know if you've made a difference. But like when I was working in a bike shop, it was fantastic. You get back on the bike and the gears change and they make the right noise and that is a great element to the job. Now in all of our jobs, there's things that either people don't know that we do or that a lot of people that do our work don't like to do. What would be something would you say for electricians that either people don't know about that they have to do or that you would say a lot of electricians may not like to do that you'd want people to be aware of? Hey, that's part of the job. I would say the weakest part of our trade is troubleshooting. And because of those older guys they left, right? So they're not around to just lean on when there's a problem. So troubleshooting is the hardest thing. We can teach people to nail boxes and drill holes and pull conductors and splice and put light fixtures up. But when you get a call to a structure, let's say that you just walked in there for the first time and somebody wired it 50 years ago, you have to know what questions to ask and where's your jumping off point is going to be to find what this issue is. And a lot of the guys that work for me do not like that, but I enjoy it. I like using my brain to try to figure out why something's not working right. Yeah, that's interesting. For me, having been involved in many construction projects in school buildings where we are going into older parts of older buildings, that's usually step number one is figuring out with usually people from a few different backgrounds, okay, what the heck is going on here? What was done in 1968 here and how are we going to attack this now? So very, very relevant in my experiences working with electricians. How do you think your job has a positive impact on the world? Well, we talked about codes, right? Everybody wants the light switch to turn on and everybody wants the light to work, the outlets to work. The older codes now didn't have the requirements that we have now. So now when you go into a 1930s house and then all of a sudden you decide to remodel the kitchen and you want all these high-end appliances, now your service may not be big enough or your wires that are in that outlet were fine for that four burner stove, but now you want this. So that's the part that I like about it. You go in and you might get called over to do one thing and you say, okay, I can do that, but I can't do that. We have to do this in order to keep it safe. So I like that about my job where I'm actually educating the customer or the GC or whatever that, hey, I can do that, but we have a few more steps we have to jump through before we get there. So let's go one sidebar and then after that, I've got one final question. The sidebar being you have a side interest hobby passion. Diving with sharks, is that right? Yes, I do. Can you tell us about that for a minute? I sure can. A lot of my friends are the shark week guys that do all the videographers and stuff, you know, and they'll take me out and we'll go, we just came back from Guadalupe, Guadalupe Island about eight months ago, dove with the Great Whites. The last time I was there at 16, one of them came in the cage and we got it all on videotape. So it was just an amazing thing. I mean, everybody is so terrified of sharks, but they have big teeth and you got to know it's like electrical work. You got to handle it with kid clubs and know what you're doing and not get yourself in over your head. But as long as you follow all the rules, it's safe. I mean, we love going to the Bahamas and my favorite spot to dive is out in the east coast where you dive with the tiger sharks. So it's just amazing. So that is a great connection you made between your occupation and your passion there that they do both appear dangerous on the surface to those of us that know less about them. And yet, if you take the right precautions, follow the right steps and kind of stick to those procedures, you're going to be real safe and there's some really important benefits that come from them in either case. And yeah, shark week is cool to watch, but sharks are also really important animals in the ocean ecosystem. And we learn a lot about them from the work that your friends do. So that's very cool. Thank you for that. With that, maybe this could come from either your day to day work or your shark diving or any of your other life experiences. Thinking about a 14-year-old, a 16-year-old, an 18-year-old, or a 20-year-old who might watch this video. What advice would you give them? I would say that when I got into this trade, it was not what I wanted to do. I was going to be a baseball player. And from day one, I was going to play baseball. When I got cut, I had to walk on for the Astros. When I got cut from that, I had to have Plan B. This was my Plan B. And after three months of doing this, I loved it. I can go anywhere in the United States and get a job. Not many people can, I mean, you can say I'm a car salesman, I can go work in California. But this is a career path here. And I've got a family of five before this virus situation. We used to go to Disney three times a year because, this is a lucrative trade. I mean, it's fun to do. Yeah. And as you said, Natalie, you talked about the OSHA changes. But a couple episodes ago, we had a guy in wind farm operations who's actually background is as a nuclear engineer. Now he's doing alternative energy stuff. And he talked about just the tremendous needs in solar and wind, for example. So there's so many cutting edge elements to electrical work. And yeah, it's really great. Having you on, like I said, electricians have come up in probably about every other episode we've done about what an important job it is and how big the need is. So having you on has been super fantastic. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. With that said, that's the end of another career pathways virtual trailheads video. If you have ideas for guests or occupations, if you have questions you'd like to see us ask, please hit us up on Twitter. Our Twitter account is at P20 Network at P20 Network, all one word. And we'll connect with you there. And we look forward to lots more episodes coming out. Jeff, thank you again for your time today. Thank you.