Why You Should Become an Electrician

hey what is going on you guys my name is Steven and today I'm going to be talking about why you absolutely should become an electrician alright so if you're looking into starting a new job or a new career oftentimes the first question on your mind is gonna be how much am I gonna make right now this question I think is especially important if you're thinking about becoming an audition because this isn't just another job okay this is a career and it's most likely one that you're gonna have for the rest of your life and if this is something that you're gonna be doing for the next 10 20 30 even 40 years of your life you're gonna want to make sure you know that you're making hopefully pretty good money and you know I'm here to tell you guys that as an electrician you're gonna be making pretty fantastic money now just like with any job or career there's a lot of different factors that go into exactly how much money you're gonna be making right it's gonna depend on you know what state you live in it's gonna depend on you know whether your union or non-union is gonna depend on the employer it's gonna depend on what license you have right there's different licenses as electricians are you gonna be a residential guy and do you want to do a low-voltage do you want to do commercial work so all these different factors play into exactly how much money you're gonna be making as an electrician now I wanna let you guys know exactly how much we make here in Portland Oregon as Union electricians working for IBEW Local 48 I just want to say real quickly as a disclaimer I have nothing against the non-union yeah I am a union guy but I also have friends that are in the non-union and they make great money too so I'm not here to say one is better than the other maybe maybe eventually I'll make a video comparing the two but for the sake of this video and these numbers that I'm about to give you guys this is what we make as union employees in Portland Oregon so per hour we make 47 dollars and 85 cents kay that comes out to be ninety nine thousand five hundred and twenty-eight dollars per year so without a college degree okay going through an apprenticeship which takes four to five years you're getting incremental wages along the way once you complete that you get your journeyman's license and then your what you would consider you know full-on electrician you're gonna be making just under a hundred thousand dollars per year some days I think that the amount that we make is pretty crazy and then I remember and I'm reminded of how dangerous of a job this is that is something to consider and this isn't an easy job by any means okay sometimes it can be physically demanding but more often than the not it's there's a lot that you have to figure out okay you definitely have to be pretty smart if you're gonna be doing this so the pay I think is you know definitely justified now for me one of the deciding factors that really really sway my decision to decide to do this as a career was actually the benefit pay now any other job that I've had in the past I have always had to pay out of pocket for my benefits right I've always had to pay X amount for health insurance for vision for dental I've had to contribute my own money to my pension you know all of that and as as a young guy that's married to a beautiful wife and I have two incredible beautiful little girls you know I want to make sure that my family is well taken care of and the benefits that we have here are amazing so it's a benefit package which means that per hour the employer will actually pay a certain amount that goes towards the health insurance towards the vision towards the dental towards the health savings account towards the multiple different pensions that we have towards the vacation pay all that so and this is on top of the hourly wage that we have so per hour what the employer pays towards our benefits is $24.99 so that means on top of the roughly $100,000 per year that we make we also make an additional fifty one thousand eight hundred thirteen dollars per year in benefits so you know I I am a union guy like I said and all the times people will say well you know don't aren't your union dues really expensive doesn't yeah you make a good amount of money but when you factor in union dues you guys really don't make that much right that's not true at all we pay as a journeyman you're gonna be paying two dollars and 25 cents an hour basically to be a part of this union and have all these benefits but when you factor that in to the hourly pay you're still making over forty five dollars an hour and if you add everything up if you add the annual wage the annual benefit package and you factor in union dues we are making a hundred and forty six thousand six hundred and sixty one dollars per year so if you are looking into this as a career just know that the pay and the benefits are a really good reason to pursue this now another big reason why I would really suggest doing this as a career is when you compare it when you compare this to going to college right now if you're gonna be if you want to become a doctor if you want to become a vets if you want to become a some sort of an engineer you're going to need to go to college right and pay for that that four-year degree and you know that's that's gonna be necessary but when you compare you know the benefits to become an electrician going to a trade school versus going to college in the apprenticeship and all that honestly it's a no brainer okay I can honestly say that becoming an electrician has been one of the best decisions that I have ever made in my life and that's partially because I don't have any college debt right now here in Portland Oregon as I said for IBEW Local 48 when you join this apprenticeship you're actually going to have your whole tuition paid for okay I haven't paid one dollar towards towards my schooling and we have the top-of-the-line schooling here this is actually one of the best training centers in the nation and the way the way this works is I go to school one day a week so I guess I am missing you know one day of pay per week but that's that's just for one term so we'll go to school for three months and you know that's one day a week for a three-month period and then I take a three-month break from school where I'm working a full 40 hours a week and then after that you know I go to the next term of school and anyways so you're getting a top-of-the-line education you're not paying anything out of pocket aside from missing a day of work per week when you are going to school and you're earning while you learn right so you are making money you're making good money while you're pursuing this is a career I may have mentioned this before but as a apprentice you are making a percentage of what the journeyman makes so I believe when you first start out you know you don't make the full 47 and 85 cents per hour you're gonna be making I believe it's somewhere around 19 to 20 dollars per hour and as you progress and as you get more hours and you complete your schooling you're going to get incremental raises in your weight just gonna keep on increasing until you hit that full journeyman's pay so yeah that's pretty fantastic the schooling is is great you're earning while you learn it's really good it's really good especially when you compare it to college like I said there's no debts no student loans that I have to pay back and one of the things that I just think is so cool is every single thing that I learned in school pertains exactly to what I'm doing in my job so I'm not wasting any you know schooling learning about general things that don't apply in any way to my career before I did this I actually went to a community college just for one year you know I learned I learned about psychology I took some PE classes I took some math classes and those were good you know I learned some some things that will hopefully help me out you know my life but going to a trade school you're gonna be learning things that apply directly to your job so that's really great now let's see here being an electrician it's a fun career okay I genuinely enjoy the work that I do the people that I work with are great and I know that depends you know on what job you're working at what employer you have who you work with all that but I really enjoy the people that I work with and I really enjoy the work that I do as I said before it is a physically demanding career at times but more often than not you're solving problems you have to figure out how to how to get from point A to point B with your pipe run right and you may have to do some crazy pipe bands and there's a lot of math that goes into that but I enjoy that you know solving problems is I something that I think is fun and there is a certain satisfaction that you have at the end of the day when you get to see a completed job and you get to see your whole days of hard work right in front of you right physically seeing what you have accomplished to me is is very rewarding in my last job it was more of a sales position I was a sales manager a store manager for a company and my at the end of the day I would see numbers right did we hit our goal do we not and that was fine you know I enjoyed that in some ways but it's not like actually seeing physically the hard work that you put in see a job be completed and just see that craftsmanship and all of your all the hard work that you put in so it's fun that's a great reason to become an electrician and one of the other reasons too is you never stop learning okay in a lot of jobs and auto careers you get to a point where you pretty much know everything and when that happens your job can become kind of boring well one thing that I've heard pretty much every journeyman say is that they never stop learning okay this is such a multi-faceted career you know you can you can spend years doing fancy pipe work and then you're gonna go to another job where maybe you're running fire alarm and maybe that's something you have never done so you're always constantly learning new things which always keeps keeps you interested and I just think that that's good I think that it mentally is great to always be learning and yeah it just keeps things interesting and fun let's see here so as far as the trades go this is a really respectable trade to be a part of that's not to bash on other trades you know I think that they are all very important obviously you know but an electrician is almost more of a profession than it is a trade so I I know for myself I'm proud when I tell people that I'm an electrician I know that my wife she tells me all the time that she's proud when she tells customers have coming to her work that her husband is an electrician and that's just something that is really cool to to be able to have a career that you're proud of I love the fact that I don't have to convince people to buy certain products that I maybe would never buy myself right at the end of the day I'm not feeling gross for selling somebody on something that they don't need I feel good that I'm providing a service to the customer that I am quite literally you know helping build America this is a career that contributes to society and without electricians you know nothing would work so not always it were respectable but it is a very necessary and a very important career and we need to have people that have this job let's see what else what else there is a lot of job security and being an electrician now all the times when people think about any sort of construction job any other trades is layoffs you know layoffs do happen that's this isn't to say that as an electrician you are never gonna see a layoff but in general electricians are in very high demand and one thing to keep in mind is and I believe right now in the current age of electricians on average is 55 years old so that means that in the next 10 years or so we're gonna be seeing a whole lot of electricians retiring and what does that mean that means that there's gonna be a huge demand for electricians in the future which means that maybe this is a good time to get your foot in the door right now get a head start because as demand increases well then also sort of the wages right and there's always going to be a high demand for electricians yeah it's you're always gonna be working and just like with any job if you're a bad employee if you're not doing your job well then yeah you're gonna you're gonna be let go you're gonna you're gonna get way it off but if you're a good hard-working employee then as an electrician you're gonna you're gonna stay busy let's see here what else did I write down you know I think I've covered the main the main things that I wanted to in this video you know the pay the benefits when you compare it to college the fact that you are always learning the fact that it's fun the fact that you're contributing to society that there is that job security security I guess one other thing that I didn't mention is the fact that once you complete your apprenticeship and you have your journeyman's license you have that license and that means that if for any reason you do decide to change your careers well you're still gonna have your license and this is always something that you can fall back on you know you can always not as a union employee right but if you're a non-union employee you can with your license go and maybe do side work and pick up some extra hours maybe even on top of another job that you choose to do instead of this so it's just awesome I mean it's it's a fantastic career and if this is something that you are looking into let me just encourage you guys pull the trigger on this do it it's one of the best decisions that I have ever made and I can honestly tell you that this will be one of the best decisions that you have ever made and it's great so I guess one thing that I want to end this video with saying is that this is the first video hopefully a whole series of videos that I want to put together I want to actually walk you guys through the whole process of becoming an electrician okay this first video is just about why you should become one I want to make a video about the about applying about taking your aptitude test about interviewing about what to expect after your you you know all of that so if you guys found this video today helpful please let me know in the comments I'm brand new to this and I would love any feedback that you can give me go ahead and subscribe to my channel maybe leave me like I'd appreciate that but yeah just subscribe that way you'll see these new videos if this is what you're interested in and I will hopefully make lots lots of more videos in the future so anyways thank you so much for sticking around thank you for watching this and have a great rest of your day you guys

Channel: Mad Electrician

Views: 26,398

Keywords: Why you should become an electrician, Why should I become an electrician?, Mad Electrician, Electrician, Electrical Work, Trade School, Ibew, Ibew Local 48, Sparky, What Do Electricians Make, How much do electricians make?, Career Change, Career, Apprenticeship, Apprentice, Electrical apprenticeship, make money, Trades, Local 48, six figure job, good job, good career, what electricians do, work, college vs trade school, college, becoming an electrician, electrician apprenticeship

Id: jbat2bL82cw

Length: 18min 16sec (1096 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020