Show notes
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.
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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?