Jobs Wanted- Workers Needed-Who Will Do The Jobs?

As a career Electronics Technician, although I would say Electronics Technologist is a better word for us now, I have been working in a utility and working within a section that is the closest to implementing SmartGrid technology and yet I have had to spend thousands of dollars, vacation and my own time to educate myself on the Smart Grid.

With the up-coming retirement of the work force in place and the new workers looking for more glamorous private employment other than utilities, the utilities will find themselves in serious trouble without training existing personnel, nor creating positions for people directly related to this very important field of the industry.

With the release of funding by the government specifically for training in the Smart Grid field field and so many IT savvy people in the colleges, having already graduated, they should be the people encouraged to be working with the existing workforce in order to obtain the practical knowledge and skills needed.

You don't just stick a computer IT person in a high voltage substation to work on the equipment running thousands of volts and controlling thousands of people's electric needs and hundreds of electrical workers lives.

I am doing what I can on my own to advance my education If some money was thrown behind mine and my fellow employees efforts, it would be very possible to move towards a SmartGrid system.

Our utility is ahead of the game, but only because we did it out of necessity. With only a few people in our section and three islands to work with, this was quite a feat.

I really hope that stimulus money is made available for the right purposes and not eaten away by studies or consultants on what should be done.
It seems fairly cut and dry as to what kind of information needs to be gathered to start moving in the right direction.
Just getting the speeches out of the way and allowing the real workers the space they need to accomplish this task would be the best approach.

Being a Union member, I would like to see the work stay within the Union and American people, but if resources are kept minimized and giant companies with big budgets come in with "demo" programs, the inevitable outcome is outsourcing the work to others and probably with no real plan or standards in place. The resulting outcome will just cost the consumers more in the end.

For more on this subject refer to these articles:

http://www.plantengineering.com/article/357358-Aging_workforce_How_will_companies_workers_cope_.php?rssid=20202&q=michael+V.+Brown

http://www.nutsandboltsfoundation.org/About-NBT.cfm

http://www.plantengineering.com/blog/Five_Fast_Things/11618-Getting_Linked_in_to_the_manufacturing_jobs_issue.php

http://www.hudson.org/files/publications/21st_Century_Workforce.pdf

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