A new training partnership in North Carolina aims to help the IBEW recruit more men and women into lineworker apprenticeships and lucrative union careers.
In August, the Southeastern Line Constructors Apprenticeship and Training program added Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington to its stable of schools.
“A lot of line work is still nonunion,” said Wilmington Local 495 Business Manager Van Mumford. “We want to make it easier to get people into the IBEW. This is a great program for that.”
SELCAT is accredited by the Electrical Training Alliance and backed by the IBEW and the union’s partners in the National Electrical Contractors Association. Its affiliation with CFCC, as with nine other educational institutions, is set up to help move lineworker program graduates into high-quality IBEW apprenticeships more quickly.
Alvin Warwick, business manager of Winston-Salem, N.C., Local 342, helped facilitate the affiliation, thanks to his 20-year work relationship with John Downing, CFCC’s vice president of economic and workforce development. Downing, a former longtime apprenticeship consultant with the state’s Department of Labor, later helped craft classes for Local 342’s inside construction apprentices at Winston-Salem’s Forsyth Technical Community College before doing something similar at CFCC for Local 495.
“John understands the importance of the IBEW,” Warwick said. “He told me, ‘We’ve also got a pretty good line school here at the college, and that nonunion companies were often hiring [CFCC] students right out of class.”
For now, the community college is the only one in North Carolina that’s partnering with SELCAT. Its 10-week program, which has room for 60 students at a time, covers the basics of line work, such as federal safety training, setting and climbing poles, and electrical theory.
By graduation, CFCC alumni earn 1,000 apprenticeship credit hours, and their training allows them to skip SELCAT’s climbing school requirement.
The IBEW values educational partnerships like this, said SELCAT Director Danny Haddad..
“These college graduates spend money to become lineworkers,” he said. “We can’t lose those folks. Let’s bring them in and find a home for them.”
About a half-hour’s drive southwest of Atlanta, the state-of-the-art SELCAT boasts a 32,000-square-foot training facility with smart classrooms, labs and dorms, and features indoor and outdoor pole-climbing labs, as well as substation and underground training.
Thanks to outreach to high schools, line colleges and utilities, Haddad said, “we have an abundance of applicants” to SELCAT. When it recently solicited public applications, for example, more than 800 men and women submitted forms online.
The applicant pool is increasingly diverse, Haddad noted. “We’re getting a lot more women applicants.”
Also, a “lineworker for a day” event last fall gave about 50 high school students a chance to climb into a bucket truck, operate excavators and backhoes, experience SELCAT’s simulators and sample the basics of pole climbing.
“This is the kind of stuff that we do to ensure that SELCAT is very well attended, and our job calls are being filled,” Haddad said, noting that applicants have a leg up when they receive line work training like the kind offered by CFCC.
Along with North Carolina, SELCAT’s certified teachers use standardized, up-to-date program materials to train lineworkers in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee, helping to keep the outside electrical industry in the Southeast supplied with highly skilled and qualified workers.
“SELCAT plays a big part in helping to keep up the reliability and strength of the IBEW’s outside construction branch,” said Tenth District International Vice President Brent Hall, whose jurisdiction includes North Carolina. “It’s good to see a school like Cape Fear Community College step in like this to help keep folks moving into the IBEW’s lineworker pipeline.”