Any electricians out there? I want to become one.

April 29, 2008 7:19 PM

I'm thinking about a career change, and I think my long time interest in anything electrical needs to be acted on. Any electricians out there want to tell me about your day to day duties?

The reason I ask is I'm worried I'll be getting into a career that involves pulling cable all day. I don't mind doing that, but I'd like lots of variety.

Ultimately, I want to work on big complex switchboards, high voltage stuff, indutrial stuff, data centers, stuff that makes you go "whoa, I made that", etc, etc.

If anyone out there who is an electrician or related field or knows someone who is, please tell me about some of the stuff you get to do while on the job and whether it keeps you interested.

Thanks very much!

(sorry i know theres a related thread, but it didnt quite have enough responses for me to get an idea)

posted by Jimmeh to work & money (5 comments total)

Depends on who you work for. "Electrician" is a very broad category.
posted by gjc at 7:35 PM on April 29, 2008

IANAE, but have friends that are, and pulling cable is deffinetly where you start, part of paying you dues.

most guys that get into the switch boards, controls, etc don't have to start by pulling wire, but instead have degrees in electrical engineering

good luck, and remember the famous line from Caddyshack " the world needs ditch diggers too" ( or something like that)
posted by Mr_Chips at 7:39 PM on April 29, 2008

At my projects (I'm a Project Manager in construction), I've seen electricians:

Install a temporary power pole
Dig a ditch for a cable*, then bury the cable
Pull wire in an attic on a day where it is 85 degrees outside
Place conduit below a concrete slab before it is poured
Fish wire through same conduit
Paint same conduit with a bituminous coating*
Caulk around conduit
Install fixtures such as lights
Install outlets and switches
Wire fire alarms
Hook up motors for HVAC systems
Wire temporary lighting
Pick up trash*
Fetch items from the truck*

*by the low guy on totem pole

One guy told me of a service call last week at a home where the ground fault interrupter was tripped- he had to press the reset button to "fix" the problem.

The bigger, more complex projects that you describe you will likely find at utility companies, big commercial electrical contractors, or at industrial electrical contractors.

The electrician is usually among the first in, and the last out on a project. You can see how the project develops over time. Electricians also see most of the trades, so they tend to know a lot of people.

The variety will largely depend on who you work for. If you work at a big project for your employer, you may know what you may be doing that week. Otherwise you will probably find out what you are doing a day or so in advance.

I am not sure if you need to be an Electrical Engineer to wire complicated projects since the EE designs the project, but you probably have to be a journeyman or a master electrician to do the complicated projects.
posted by Monday at 8:07 PM on April 29, 2008

It probably varies by state (if you are in the US) and certainly by country (if you are not), but where I live the process of going from amateur to master electrician is long and involved. It's comparable to a graduate education, really -- two years for an AA degree, which lets you then become an apprentice, after about four years you can take the journeyman's exam (which is very tough), and then more years of higher-level work before becoming a master electrician.

So the plus side is that there is a huge variety of work you can get into (from household stuff to enormous industrial and power-supply projects), and it can pay really well. But there are a lot of barriers to entry, and you have to be pretty motivated to really advance in it as a career.

(I am not an electrician and never will be, but I was recently considering the same transition, and met with the people who run the electrical program at the local community college. If you are seriously considering this, I would suggest doing the same -- they will know every detail of a standard career track, what sorts of jobs their program graduates are getting, etc. At least here, they were super nice, and were happy to spend lots of time talking with me to see if this was a good fit, and were very honest about what parts were good and what weren't. I decided that it wasn't a good fit for me, largely because it is a such a long process, and the work I thought would be the most interesting is not in this area.)
posted by Forktine at 10:14 PM on April 29, 2008

I am not an electrician, but one of my friends is, and based on talking to her, at least here in Ontario, residential and industrial electricians are basically different career paths from very early on in the process. So if you go in for being an industrial electrician (not the circuit board thing which is, oddly enough, what she was doing before she became an electrician, but doing wiring for factories and such), there's little chance you'll end up wiring houses all day.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:35 AM on April 30, 2008