If you want to be relevant, you have to be able to step up and SOLVE problems for people.

This is WHY I tend to never, ever, ever TRUST professionals … even though I am a professional – I am a generalist, not a specialist.

My main skill as a multidisciplinary engineer is as a generalist who not only can learn, but LOVES to learn how to do impossibly HARD things … and loves learning and developing new skills more than anything else, certainly more than dipshit stuff like sports or politics, which are just conversation starter topics, like the weather.

If you never want to worry about anything and generally be the most FREE person in any room, even if that room is in a maximum security prison, then you need to be able to be able to think about how you go about developing a self-paced study curriculum for leveling up your own professional skills in the kinds of things that are really going to matter.

For example … my own health problems will matter [to me] and no other professional is going to be close to being able to solve my health problems for me than ME … SELF-DEFENSE, fitness, balance and ability to survive a confrontation with my carpetted stairs is important to me … another example, INFORMATION UTILITY INFRASTRUCTURE, including things like local information infrastructure, comm bandwidth, satellite and RF comms and things like cloud compute resources/auctions for scientific HPC are going to be more relevant TO ME moving forward … LOCALLY, there are things like gas/electric systems, water/sewer systems, resource recovery systems, postage/shipping systems are STILL relevant to me … whereas something like an automobile or what stores I can visit in Sioux Falls just no longer holds my interest, because there are better resources now and even better ones being built.

The POINT is that readiness depends upon continually surveying the landscape to ensure that one’s skills stay relevant.

The problems in your utility infrastructure future are never going to go away.

So … if you want to be PROFESSIONAL asset for your community AND earn a respectable income for yourself … you can invest in seriously levelling up your professional skillset … you could buy yourself a journal for taking notes on JUST this topic and label your notes about the journey as something like “Professional Skills Body of Knowledge for Electricians, Utility Infrastructure and Power Systems Engineers” … and, guess what, since the problem is never going to go away, you can ALSO make skads of money investing companies that actually get how to continually level up skillsets in this particular area.

It might SEEM like dull, tedious stuff, but following this topic will be far more rewarding AND lucrative than following football or basketball or politics. If you think otherwise, think about something watching a Superbowl or March Madness game during a Winter power outage OR trying to keep from having a heart attack or some other heat exhaustion event during a Summer power outage … and it’s not JUST the power outages, but the skads of money that will be spent for uber reliable backup power for hospitals, nursing homes and AFFLUENT people. UTILITY stuff is only dull, tedious stuff when there are capable professionals working to make it seem dull, tedious … and THOSE UTILITY PROFESSIONALS are hitting retirement age and the demographics of capable professionals coming on-line now could look a little better.

If we were starting from zero … and wanted to START developing our own self-paced study curriculum for *power systems engineering, utility infrastructure and electician training for the next 25 - 50 years we can get a very general, but relatively complete, just by simplying starting with a question about developing this curriculm and Body of Knowledge of BARD.

Now OBVIOUSLY … that first answer is ONLY the start of the Start of the START of a very long process … but it’s enough to BOOT UP the inital components of our educational operating system to eventually load up some ideas … which can help us to get started thinking about this curriculum.

We cannot wait for a boss or a college administrator or even some, close-to-the-ground community college instructor to send out some flyer inviting us to take in that magic continuing ed seminar that we need in order to double our salary … it’s 2024! That means we need to stop waiting for our education to be spoonfed to us and we NEED to get going ourselves.

This takes a DILIGENT, level-headed, hard-working, self-starter, who is willing to spend a few hours, SERIOUSLY thinking and planning about the topic of professional skills investment … specifically, we can look at something like developing self-study curriculum, body of knowledge and training resources, which we will improve as we get into it, long before much $ is spent.

Don’t worry about the details … just GET GOING.

# The problems in your utility infrastructure future are not going to go away.

Armed with your starting answer and Bard, you just start asking more questions … and doing a lot of reading in order to ask better questions. After spending an afternoon or FIVE, just refining the questions, curating lists of materials … you can START developing PRIORITIZED lists that will match up with available funds. You can DISCUSS these lists with the appropriate people … but at some point, it will time to write the first $1000 check and start just getting familiar with the lay of the land … at first, the people involved in doing the training will only be grumbling about the training, the expectations and the lack of support for what they REALLY need … but it’s important to START:

$1000 for the very highest priority materials … this is the foundational stuff, to be pursued immediately, to give everyone a BASIC idea of what kinds of materials are out there … the $1000 budget is something that won’t be a problem; it’s at the don’t worry, we’ll find the $1000 somewhere for this introductory survey of the general Body of Knowledge stuff level.
$5000, for the highest priority materials … this is in the realm of something probably need to pursue as soon as practical, it might not be easy to just find $5000 laying around for this, but we’ll make it up somewhere Body of Knowledge and training materials level.
$10,000 for high priority materials … this in the realm of the kind of things that the responsible people should really have because they are the ones responsible for things that are worth hundreds or even thousands of times $10,000 … budget-wise this in the realm of maybe we’ll get a grant or find something somewhere to pay for this, but somehow we really should be able to come up with *10,000 worth of essential training materials necessary for key employees to complete the curriculum and pass the relevant certification exams

It’s necessary to start spending SOMETHING on self-paced materials for training … so that self-starters can actually start using the materials to pass relevant industry certifications … and the NON self-starters can be let go to pursue the types of employment they want to pursue … BUT THE POINT OF THIS IS TO CREATE A CULTURE OF SELF-STARTING PROFESSIONALS WHO ARE DEMANDING BETTER AND BETTER TRAINING IN ORDER TO DELIVER BETTER AND BETTER UTILITY SERVICE.