Apprenticeships are a core piece of how we do our business here at ClayDean. Amy Van Meter, Director of Talent Acquisition for ClayDean Electric sat down for a conversation about her approach to building ClayDean’s apprenticeship program.
Here’s our conversation:
What was ClayDean’s motivation for developing an apprenticeship program?
Amy: At ClayDean apprenticeships are a core piece of how we build our company and deliver great work. It’s important for us to develop the next generation of great electricians. We are working with the state of Colorado on an apprentice program for behavioral data analysis.
Imagine what that means – you are an apprentice. You write your journeyman license, maybe you write your Masters. You are smart, you are hardworking and you’ve learned programming and design. You’ve learned how to dispatch and monitor behavioral data from smart tech that makes a building more efficient and economical. Boom! You are leading the change. ClayDean is serious about our investment in expanding our trade because we believe the next generation of electricians will help us change and evolve this industry.
The ClayDean team, including you, spend a lot of time in the community. It’s part of who we are as a company. How have those relationships helped you build talent?
Amy: We work with over 100 community partners in the Denver Metro area that have access to job seekers. And so when we have an opening we will send an email out and say, “Hey, we have a need for people in apprenticeships, you know, we have a need for brand new people who are interested in electrical, who want to learn the trade.”
It’s four years of hands-on learning and education. We want people who are looking for a change, looking for an opportunity, and want to build a career. And that’s how we’ve found fantastic people that make up the team here at ClayDean.
Can you share the time commitment an apprenticeship program takes?
Amy: There is a requirement to have a certain proportion of what we call “on-the-job-learning”, which is the time at the employer versus the more traditional instruction — classroom or online learning. Typically, that sort is roughly equaled to about 2,080 hours per year working to about 144 hours a year of related instruction. And, it’s pretty consistent across whatever occupation you’re in.
What we have learned from becoming a registered apprenticeship with the state of Colorado, and having that credential is proof-positive that ClayDean Electric is dedicated to our apprentice electricians. We want our team to have the highest quality of training in our industry. And, we want that experience to be documented. Many people aren’t aware that that credential that comes from the US Department of Labor is a national credential. So by completing your apprenticeship at ClayDean, for example, an electrician can go to another state and show that they have their US Department of Labor credential, and that means something.
Amy, you are so great at making sure that people have their hours documented. Some of us may move to Colorado, and we don’t have a lot of our hours documented. But, we need those hours in order to go to DORA and take the test. I don’t know how that works with other industries, but for the electrical industry, it’s very important that we, as apprentices, have the hands-on hours. If it’s from the military, if it’s from another job, or it’s from another state, we need those hours documented.
Amy: Yeah, those documented hours mean everything to our guys as an apprentice. And you worked those hours and you deserve to have that documented. So yeah, that’s real important to us.
This is a serious career path, isn’t it?
Amy: ClayDean is working hard to ensure our apprenticeship program creates a good living for our tradespeople too. We are just as focused on the wage scale as we are the highly-technical training that we want for our apprentices. Your journeyman license and certainly your masters should be compensated as competitive a rate as an applied science degree. In part, because you will be the one designing and installing this new technology. ClayDean intends for our electricians to be an integral part of energy infrastructure to humans, satellites, and Wi-Fi and all the connectivity that links transportation, mobility, and building infrastructure. We aim to keep all of that in the family of an electrical apprenticeship.
Our aim with our apprenticeship program is to create opportunities wherein five, six, or seven years you could be making a competitive wage and not have school-loan debt because you’re part of renewable energy infrastructure. Whoever has the drive and ambition to walk on to one of my job sites as an unexperienced apprentice electrician has the opportunity to create that for themselves.
ClayDean doesn’t view apprenticeships like other, more traditional electrical firms do. Can you explain why?
Amy: In our industry, we’re no longer talking about the big gray boxes we normally put on the backside of buildings, but we’re talking about programming and using things like behavioral data analysis, information, and big-data…global data analysis… where we’re looking at information, watching how people consume energy. That’s a huge part of these new systems. That’s not something you’re ever going to hear about in a traditional apprenticeship program.
Microgrid or power management systems that pull energy from renewable sources on an industrial scale. What that has an impact on our apprenticeship program, because as we become more and more successful, and we execute those projects and bring them into fruition, number one, there’s about a trillion-dollar migration in the global economy, from oil, infrastructure, energy, traditional energy infrastructure, to what we’re talking about, and that’s happening. Along with that, you can imagine speaking on that scale of things globally, there’s a very serious progression in the technology and the equipment and the material and the tools that we have to do those installations.
ClayDean’s podcast, Table26
Hear more from Amy on ClayDean’s podcast, Table26. In the latest episode, Denise Miller joins the ClayDean crew. Denise is the Coordinator for Apprenticeships and Experiential Learning for the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment (CDLE). In our opinion, Denise has one of the key roles in workforce development here in Colorado. Her organization supports employers and job seekers, helping them find the right opportunities.
Interested in an apprenticeship with ClayDean Electric? Here’s how to apply.