BuildTurbines.com: A Resource for Wind Energy Careers

Buildturbines.com is a resource for people joining the wind energy
industry, from technicians to sales and marketing. The website
includes career path information with experience and certifications
needed as well as salary ranges. With in-depth articles and a
training school location map, buildturbines.com is what you need to
get started on your new career path. Sign up now for Uptime Tech
News, our weekly email update on all things wind technology. This
episode is sponsored by Weather Guard Lightning Tech. Learn
more about Weather Guard's StrikeTape Wind Turbine LPS
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show? Email us! Pardalote Consulting -
https://www.pardaloteconsulting.comWeather Guard Lightning Tech -
www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com Allen
Hall: Welcome to this July 4th edition of the Uptime Wind Energy
Podcast. I'm your host, Allen Hall, and I'm here with Joel Saxum,
and we have some exciting news to share. Joel Saxum: So the
exciting news is that we put a new website together. It's called
buildturbines.com, and why we did it is to get more exposure to the
wind industry. We know we have a technician problem. Allen and I
have talked to many people trade shows in person, our wind farm
tours that we do, of course. Anybody you talk to in the wind
industry, every single company is saying, Hey, everybody's a
recruiter. Everybody's a recruiter. We need people. And then you
even get down to the the training centers, the community colleges,
they're thinking, Hey, we need students. We need students. And just
the simple fact that we have a little bit of reach in the wind
industry. We said, what can we do about this? So we put together
some resources. On a website, it's BuildTurbines. com again and
we're going to continue to keep adding to it to make it into a
resource for anybody that's interested in getting into the wind
industry, whether it's from a technician standpoint. All the way to
engineers and back office people, we want to put resources out
there for them. Allen Hall: Yeah, and the big push from an industry
standpoint obviously is in employment, trying to get people into
the positions or having a really difficult time. That is obvious
and that even though some of the trade training schools and
community colleges, which are doing a lot of the training in the
United States, are having a hard time keeping those programs up and
running because just the number of people applying for those
positions to enter into a trade school is relatively low. And I
think it's because a lot of young people don't know that they can
have a career and win. That is a long term career. You can make
good money. You can raise a family on it. And you don't have to
have a college degree to go do it. And we're just trying to raise
some awareness about it and we've put out some information on the
social media platforms LinkedIn, obviously. We're on the web at
buildturbines. com and then we also have an Instagram page, which,
the Instagram page looks great so far, Joel. Joel Saxum: Yeah.
Technicians are on Instagram, right? People are on Instagram these
days. On the Instagram page, we'll be sharing all kinds of
resources. We'll be sharing pictures. We plan to, right? This is
our goal with this. And we want to share pictures from the field,
videos from the field, people doing their job every day. What's
actually happening out there. And then get people interested in,
get young people interested, get mid career people interested in
the wind industry, get vets coming out of their respective branches
interested in the wind industry. We sit in an odd space, right? The
wind turbines are an oddly visible thing, right? They're huge. You
drive down the road, you see these things. So they're visible to
the person, but however, the industry isn't that visible to the
person, right? So you may see these turbines in your backyard or
down the farm or in the next county over, but you look at them and
you go I don't know, how do I get in? How can I do that? How can I
get in? How can I work on these things? How can I get into that
industry? Where we have competing industries is in not the same
space, but like spaces, say the oil and gas world. When the oil and
gas world needs people, they say, Hey, come to this. They'll put
out, ads on the, in the paper and ads on radio and stuff of this
sort saying, come to this, we're having a hiring fair, come to this
hotel, bring your resume we'll get people into jobs in the oil
field that way. We don't do that as a wind industry because we do
need a little bit of. Specific skills. If you're, working on
blades, you may have a work at heights thing. We might be working
on ropes. There's specific trainings that we need to go through all
these things. Nothing's really super basic. But we need a resource
for everybody to go to, right? Allen Hall: So that's what the,
that's what this thing's going to do. Now, when you go to
buildturbines. com, there is a jobs report. You can click on that
link and you can download that jobs report. And what's inside of
there are the qualifications you need to be a win. Turbine
technician entry level or blade repair person or to be a site
manager and which a lot of people don't realize like those skills
are achievable for a lot of people already in oil and gas or
already in another industry or Just coming out of high school or
coming out of community college those skillsets you probably
possess As Joel pointed out, you may need a couple of training
programs to get you introduced to the field, but nothing
complicated. We're talking about usually a couple of weeks for a
lot of these programs to get introduced, get the safety training
you need, get yourself out in the field. If you have basic
mechanical skills, basic electrical skills, you will be able to
find employment relatively quickly in the wind industries, unlike
some other industries at the minute. And I think that's the point,
Joel, is that a lot of people are looking in places where there are
not opportunities, and meanwhile Wind is, you should be knocking on
the wind door right now. Joel Saxum: Yeah, for sure. Every company
that you talk to is looking for people, looking for good people. A
lot of entry level technicians come out there just come, go out and
do a hard day's work, or a good day's work, and you're it. On the
website, we have a few different things, right? One of them being
just some articles. If you're new to the winnings field and don't
know that much about it, there's just some information. What a day
in the life looks like. How, what kind of technology you're working
with. What does it look like to work in cold weather? Those kind of
just general things or interesting things of little pieces of
information that we've gathered over the years. And we'll continue
to add to that as well. We also have a section for training
schools. So there's a map and it has basically a nation, it's a,
there's a nationwide search there for all kinds of training
schools. We also have on that same page some of the featured wind
energy training schools. And these are friends of the podcast.
These are people we know, people we've visited, we've been to their
facilities. We encourage anybody that has a, a wind energy training
school, get ahold of us get some input on this thing. Share your
marketing with us. How are we, how can we drive more people to you
guys? That's what we want to do here. We also have a section on the
website about career paths, right? So we walk through the, wind
turbine technicians, offshore wind technicians, site manager,
project managers, engineers permitting specialists, safety, sales,
all kinds of different things in this industry. But we've gone to a
little bit further of a level saying, okay, what does the job do?
So what does a wind technician do? What kind of qualifications are
required? What kind of on the job skills will you learn? Or is it
nice to have? What are the salary expectations, right? How can you
earn a living? Like what, it's a these are, this is the fastest
growing industry by every job report that the federal government
puts out and how can you earn a living in it? How can you make some
money? The money's there. The money's good. Especially in some of
these rural areas. So we have all of these different resources on
the website. It will continue to grow. It's a living document,
right? It's like anything and we are happy to grab any kind of
input from the market too. Allen Hall: Yeah, and if you're looking
for a training school, and a lot of people new to the wind energy
marketplace want to take some training, it's probably the right
thing to do for a lot of newcomers. It can be hard to find training
schools around you just searching the web. I don't know why that is
at the moment, but some of them are well hidden on the web. They're
there. They're probably within an hour or two of where you
currently are. But it's sometimes hard to figure out where those
resources exist. So if you just go to build turbines. com and click
on the link training schools, it'll take you right there. There's a
map. You can find something real close to you and start talking to
the advisors or the counselors at those schools and those training
facilities to see what it would take to get started there. And I
think that's one of the impediments, honestly, Joel, is that a lot
of newcomers to the industry don't realize that there is training
close by. Joel Saxum: Yeah, for sure. There's 185 different
programs in the states on this map in this resource from energy.
gov. We know that there's new ones popping up all the time, and
some of the specific company ones may not be listed on here, right?