Why should I join?

A senior P&C engineer earlier in my career said, “It takes 5-10 years experience to make a decent protection engineer.” It is truly a steep learning curve in our field. He was right…without a proper mentor.

But my desire is to infuse into my students what has taken me 10+ years to obtain. I won’t be able to completely short circuit your learning curve, but my goal is to condense time for you. Allow you to learn from my mistakes and breakthroughs I have had to fight for, rather than have to work through those yourselves. Distill down the most important lessons learned from countless hours of reading technical papers, real life commissioning in the field, and successfully leading teams of junior engineers just like you.

Allow my ceiling to become your floor...

You will be able to start off running huge steps above where I started!

Your career will accelerate and advance much faster than if you tried to figure it out on your own because you will be properly trained and capable of adding huge value to your company’s business. Your compensation will grow with your competency.

Junior Protection and Control Engineer:

Did you learn in your university academic courses what you need today to do your job right?

Certainly you walked away with a good handle on electrical fundamentals, but did you gain any applied understanding of protection and control?

Now that you find yourself as an engineer in the electric power industry, do you see a huge gap in your skillset which feels like a chasm far too wide to cross over on your own?

Do you struggle to find an experienced mentor in your professional career niche?

Are your supervisors & managers technically competent and able to teach you the ins and outs of our field?

Does your company have senior P&C engineers who you can look to for guidance, or have they all recently retired, leaving you stranded?

Or are those senior P&C engineers all unavailable, too busy with more important project assignments to have any bandwidth to share with you?

Have you been spending hours searching the web and IEEE journals to try to find technical papers on protection topics, only to find most of them written to an advanced level audience and not entry level explanations?

In these uncertain economic times of a worldwide pandemic, do you find yourself graduating without a first entry level job position, needing to invest in your own development to get a leg up on your peers on your resume and interviews?

Is your company sending you to P&C training course events with live experienced instructors to allow you the opportunity to learn & grow in your career development?

Or are only the more mid-level & senior engineers with PE licenses who need PDH/CEU credits given that chance, not the EIT’s?

If you’re at a utility, do your colleagues typically rotate job functions every 2-3 years, leaving no one experienced in your department that can guide you? Or does your utility contract out all of the heavy design engineering work to other firms, leaving you to only oversee consultants who are more experienced than you. 

If you’re in the engineering design contractor/consulting world, does your boss say you must stay utilized & billable on client projects 85% of your time, leaving little bandwidth for investigative learning?

Would you love to attend a particular classroom experience such as an SEL University course, but your company can’t give you that time off and won’t sponsor it because its not in their overhead expenses budget, and you can’t personally afford it?

Are you stuck having to try to learn with purely on-the-job training? Have they just thrown you in to see if you sink or swim?

Do you long for a networked community of fellow junior P&C Engineers who can learn together, with an experienced mentor to guide you all along on the right path? A place to connect with others who are in the same stage of their careers and want to help each other succeed.

Since you can’t go to an all week in-person training event with a full-time job, what if you could receive a superior quality learning experience virtually from the comfort of your home or office, breaking down these extremely complex subjects into bite-sized digestible pieces each day spread out over time?

I was exactly in your shoes almost 15 years ago now.

Through my career, I have had the opportunity to work for a large investor owned utility, for a relay product manufacturer R&D team, and for multiple consulting services businesses performing P&C designs for clients. So whichever of these you find yourself in, I can understand your business environment!

I have successfully climbed the corporate ladder. Individual contributor engineer, direct line supervisor of 5, manager of a group of 12, vice president responsible for all the business in my entire state. Yet most recently I have chosen to take a step back to a Principal Engineer – Protection & Control title without any management duties, in order for me to focus back again on my technical expertise which I love to practice.

Yet there is 1 part of my career in all of these steps up which has consistently stood out as the thing which has brought me the most joy: teaching, training, & mentoring others a few steps behind me. It has been the favorite part of my job description. And has produced much fruit in changing other’s lives. But don’t take my word for it. Check out the references below from current & former mentees of mine. Ones who have already climbed the ladder behind me and today are project managers, supervisors, group managers, branch managers, and entrepreneurs who have started their own independent consulting firms.

At one time I managed a group of 10+ junior P&C Engineers, made up of interns, coops, and associate engineers fresh out of college. I developed training & development plans for folks just like you.

I hosted weekly lunch & learn training sessions to help those young engineers get their careers started on the right path.

I have provided live in-person 1-5 day training courses to clients of mine over the years. The feedback is consistently that they would love to do more classes with me.

At my most recent employer, I had the privilege of hosting recurring live virtual P&C training courses available to over 40 P&C Engineers across the company, in various office locations across the country and even internationally. And I have realized I have something to offer that ought to be available to junior P&C Engineers like you across our industry and all over the world.

So why not devote the bulk of my time to what I love to do the most, what is the most rewarding and fulfilling, and I get the joy of seeing others to succeed in their own careers too.

God told Abraham in Genesis chapter 12 verse 2, “I will bless you…so that you will be a blessing.”

My P&C career has truly been blessed. I love our field, I am passionate about our craft. It is both an art and a science. I have the love of learning still to this day. There is always more to learn in our realm. The more I learn, the deeper I find I go, the more I realize there’s so much more to mine the depths.

I started my P&C career as an Automation Engineer, responsible for SCADA, communications, protocols, HMI design, etc. I learned all of these through project experience. Then was able to spend some time in a relay product R&D role implementing these technologies in the latest microprocessor relays used by companies all across our industry. I mined the depths down to the hexadecimal code, reaching a level of expert proficiency and mastery. I felt I had reached a place of saturation in that realm. It wasn’t enough for me to simply know how to pass the data along, not understanding the significance of the information on that communications channel.

So then I converted over to become a Protection Engineer. I already had 5+ years experience as an expert Automation Engineer. Yet overnight I found myself back again at the novice level in a new realm, starting at a similar place as fresh college grads. It felt a bit like when I lived overseas for 2 years, and became like a little child having to learn a foreign language by immersion. So I climbed the learning curve again through 5+ years of experience in protection.

Then I found myself designing entire substations, responsible for not just the P&C piece but also Physical/Electrical, Civil/Structural, Transmission Line Design, & Distribution Feeder Design too. I found myself as a novice yet again.

So I sympathize with where you are at, looking at the steepness of the learning curve slope, feeling like you don’t know if you can take the next step up on your own.

But know that you are not alone! Over the last 15 years of my P&C career, it has been my joy to serve as a mentor to junior P&C Engineers who are right where I once was. And we are growing this community of others just like you to be able to come together and encourage one another on this journey. We invite you to join us!