Winnipeg, Manitoba, Local 2085 member Madina Nur could feel the pressure last September while competing in the Ideal Championship in West Palm Beach, Fla., and not just because she was the only electrician from Canada to qualify for the electrical tool maker’s annual televised tournament.
“As soon as you step in, it’s just like a fishbowl, with everybody looking at you and cameras and lights,” said Nur, a third-year apprentice who works for IBEW signatory contractor McCaine Electric. “It was extremely nerve-wracking.”
Nur’s electrical trade career began after high school as a labourers on an industrial site.
“I saw what all the trades do and all the different options I had for work. I never really got to see that in high school,” said Nur, who was soon accepted into Local 2085’s Apprenticeship Manitoba program.
“I could see right from the beginning that Madina is extremely intelligent with theory, and her practical skills were really good,” said Steven Sprange, a Local 2085 member who teaches pre-employment skills at the local’s Code of Excellence Training Center. “She was the only person I’ve ever taught who got 100% on a code final exam.”
Nur has also experienced a breadth of work situations during her apprenticeship, starting with construction on a Manitoba Hydro building to control dams in the northern part of the province. “I got to pull heavy wire and look at switch gears and see all kinds of stuff,” she said.
More recently, Nur has worked with McCaine on projects at Winnipeg’s St. Boniface Hospital and StandardAero, an international airplane manufacturer.
“Madina has a really good attitude and work ethic, which is something that’s really hard to teach,” Sprange said. “She always had stuff ready to go, always was looking for more to do.”
Nur learned about the Ideal competition through Local 2085, which teamed up with the company to hold qualifiers at the training center.
“Initially, I was like, ‘That sounds cool,’ but Florida wasn’t even in the forefront of my mind as a possibility,” she said.
That didn’t keep her from winning first place. “Others were faster, but they didn’t do things correctly,” she said.
Shortly afterward, Nur passed an online electrical code quiz meant to help narrow the field of thousands of competitors from across Canada and the U.S. “It was nice that [the quiz] came with a Canadian code version,” she said.
Next, she had to work on a competition kit that was mailed to her. “[Ideal] wanted you to film yourself putting together three receptacles,” Nur said: “one wired regularly, then a [ground fault circuit interrupter] receptacle, and then another regular receptacle that needed to be protected by the GFCI.”
After submitting her video, Nur was notified that she had been selected for an all-expenses-paid trip to West Palm Beach for the 2024 electrical championship, to compete for a share of more than $30,000 in cash and prizes.
There, she joined five journeyman wiremen and nine other apprentices from across the U.S., a mix of IBEW and nonunion electricians that included the competition’s only other woman, Oklahoma City Local 1411 apprentice Abby Roush.
The two-day championship also featured competitions for workers in HVAC, plumbing and auto tech, with the electricians’ challenge as a grand finale. Each apprentice was instructed to install an electrical subpanel and then an air handler with a heating coil. Jobs like these might take experienced journeymen several hours to complete. The apprentices had 90 minutes, with judges and TV cameras following every move.
“I guess they wanted you to show your thinking skills,” Nur said. “They don’t give you much prep time, and I definitely did not get as much done as I would have liked to, but I tried my best.
While Nur didn’t take home one of the top prizes, she hasn’t ruled out competing again. “It was definitely a good experience,” she said. “I’ll see how I feel about it when it comes around for qualifying again.”
First District International Vice President Russ Shewchuk congratulated Nur on her role-model performance. “Bringing more women and first-generation Canadians like Madina into the IBEW is extremely important to the future of our union,” he said.
The competition aired in December on the CBS Sports Network. It’s viewable online at youtu.be/rKcTtCjdx0g.
