Exploring Nuclear Energy Jobs
Nuclear energy offers interesting and rewarding careers. The sector employees nearly 100,000 people with an average annual wage of about $100,000. Beyond financial rewards, nuclear power can provide jobs that allow people meaningful careers. What may surprise some is...
Understanding Trade Schools as a Natural Path for Gas Workers
The natural gas industry is booming. With increasing volumes from production to transmission to distribution, it takes a massive workforce to maintain the millions of miles of gas lines and trillions of dollars of equipment and infrastructure. And with an aging...
Exploring Offshore Wind and the Careers it Offers
Europe has been developing offshore wind farms for decades, but in the United States today this industry is starting to grow exponentially. The 30 MW Block Island Wind Farm – the first offshore wind farm in the U.S. – was completed in 2016, and the 12 MW Coastal...
Using Trade Schools To Start a Career as a Lineworker
Electric power is a $400 billion dollar industry with a massive workforce. With older generations retiring, aging power systems, and new initiatives for clean energy and electric vehicles, demand for energy professionals is high, and expected to grow. That demand is...
Understanding the Role of Energy Contractors
Among the unsung heroes that keep America’s energy flowing are private contractors and their employees. They are key contributors to everything from maintaining electric reliability to refueling nuclear power stations to laying natural gas pipelines. Electric and...
Why Energy Storage and the Careers it Offers Are So Important
Type the phrase “energy storage” into an online jobs board and the screen is likely to populate with an abundance of career opportunities. Energy storage has become one of the most in-demand career segments of the energy industry. To understand the energy storage...
4 Key Ways Energy Companies Are Embracing Diversity
Many people who work in energy can remember when finding job opportunities in the industry was all about “who you knew.” Maybe a grandfather worked for an energy company and then an uncle. It was a family connection, or a good friend worked at the company, and that’s...
A Day in the Life of a Nuclear Power Plant Professional
When Margarita Villa is at the store with her family shopping in the produce section and they pass by the organic foods, she likes to say that nuclear energy is the organic food of the energy world. “I like to call it organic energy,” says Villa, a mechanical design...
The Energy Industry Seeks Engineers
Energy Engineers Are… Building pipelines to carry renewable natural gas from farms to homes. Designing the next generation of nuclear units to supply 24/7 carbon-free electricity. Enhancing the ‘smart’ electric grid to increase reliability and speed storm...
How Unions Support the Energy Workforce
The energy industry has some of the strongest participation rates in labor unions in the country. More than 90% of utility companies are supported by a union workforce. In fact, more than 20 percent of employees at the nation’s electric companies are union members....
A Day in the Life Of An Energy Lineworker
Jeremy Young can remember the exact moment when he knew he wanted to get into the power industry. He was installing floor tiles. Two of his uncles taught him the craft, and he started doing the work part-time in high school. He was installing floor tile for about six...
Electric Vehicles Are Driving New Job Opportunities
If you want to be a part of America’s drive to electric vehicles, working for an energy company is a good place to be. Building rapid charging stations. Generating and moving clean power to where and when it is needed. Solving complex IT and information analysis...
Getting Started: Education Ideas to Launch an Energy Career
With so many different jobs in the energy industry, it can be tough to navigate where and how to start your career journey. Students and career explorers often ask how they should prepare themselves. More specifically, they are curious about college requirements,...
What to Expect as an Energy Apprentice
When Paige Spietz went to work at electric utility Evergy, she joined the likes of Elvis Presley, Leonardo da Vinci, Henry Ford, and Benjamin Franklin. They all started out as apprentices. Maybe you should, too. The energy industry has thousands of apprenticeship...
A Day in the Life of a Solar Technician
Kiera Nelson’s day literally starts with the sun. As a solar technician for Southern Power, Nelson’s necessary tasks working with solar inverters – the brains of a solar power installation – may start sooner in summer when the sun rises earlier or later in winter when...
Why You Should Consider Teaching Energy Curriculum
It’s true – the possibilities are endless when students are exposed to careers in energy. We have seen hundreds of professionals who educate the energy-enthused workforce of the future to bring fresh, young talent to the industry. These students are poised to join a...
A Day in the Life of an HR Professional
Isaiah Wattree started his job as an HR analyst at Evergy in May of 2020 during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic. “So I had to start remote,” he says, explaining that Evergy was created in 2018 as a result of a merger between Westar Energy and Kansas City Power &...
Energy Companies Score High on Corporate Equality Index
Energy companies are implementing vital policies and practices to recruit, retain, and fully include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) employees in their businesses. In fact, many of them are participating annually in the Human Rights Campaign’s...
The Future of the Energy Grid
Picture a large manufacturing plant with delivery trucks fanning out on one-way roads. The manufacturer decides what the customers get and when. Now think of millions of scattered manufacturing plants with outputs constantly changing. Customers have morphed into...
Testing the Energy Field: How Internships Have Electrified the Next Generation
Like many college students, Jennifer Poniatowicz had no idea what she wanted to do with her life when she suddenly fell in love. “I was like a kid in a candy store,” the 25-year-old Virginia Tech graduate remembered. The object of her affection? The energy industry....
A Day in the Life of a Natural Gas Distribution Professional
Sandra Sanchez, a First Responder at New Jersey Natural Gas (NJNG), a gas distribution company that serves over half a million customers in New Jersey, is passionate about her work. She is a diligent and dedicated employee, role model, and advocate for more women to...
Empowering Women In Energy
Innovation is critical for the power industry to continue to deliver both traditional and new forms of energy safely, reliably, and efficiently. While continued innovation drives and sustains growth, research from Ernst & Young Global Limited suggests the one...
Advice to Career Changers
What do a management consultant, an accountant, a travel and event planner, and a testing and verification specialist have in common? They are all energy professionals who started their careers in different fields, and they all have words of advice for others looking...
How Technology Is Changing the Future of Energy
Blockchain and artificial intelligence. Green hydrogen. Electric vehicles. Advanced solar, wind and hydro power. Next-gen nuclear. Smart everything and batteries everywhere. These technologies and many more are driving the American energy industry toward a future few...
Hurricane Heroes
When a hurricane hits, high-speed winds and dangerous storm surges blast through neighborhoods, toppling power lines and leaving communities in the dark. In the wake of these and other devastating storms, families can sit for days or weeks without the ability to cool...
A Five to Ten Year Outlook for the Energy Industry
“Rapid convergence” might be the best description of where the U.S. energy industry is headed in the next five to 10 years. Demand for energy is rebounding as the nation recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic. While growth in consumption is expected to be slow but steady...
Energy Professionals Are Stewards of the Environment
Matt Overton spends many of his days in the field protecting birds, bats, and bees. Lora Anguay is leading her company’s charge to be carbon-free by 2030. Nick Popielski is making sure his company’s efforts to battle climate change are credible and effective. Maybe...
A Day in the Life of a Hydroelectric Energy Professional
Vern Cochran believes there are three areas for work that are extremely reliable – no matter what the economy is doing at the time. “People need to eat, people need fuel, and people need power,” he says. Cochran has worked in all three of these areas, but he believes,...
With Climate Change on Her Mind, This Engineer Sees a Future in Nuclear
Clean Energy Advocate, Engineer, and Graduate Student. Like many young people today, the environment and climate change are driving my future and my life choices. As the recent youth-led climate protests have highlighted, the youngest among us will have to face the...