Becoming an Electrician: Working with Your Hands and Challenging Your Mind
The electrician career is perfect for people who enjoy hands-on work, but at the same time, you can’t become an electrician without a penchant for learning and being able to apply and create schematics to keep an electrical system running safely and effectively. An electrician possesses an interest in electrical wiring and maintaining, designing, and building the most efficient electrical system possible. There is a little danger with the position, solely because you’re dealing with electricity, but if you have the right temperament for the job, you’ll quickly learn how to perform your job safely.
An electrician may maintain, design or re-wire the electrical systems in homes, businesses and factories. An electrician may also work on the electrical operations in equipment and machinery, such as traffic lights, manufacturing equipment, and intercom systems. The items with which the electrician frequently deals include light fixtures, electrical outlets, electrical wiring, transformers, circuit breakers, and fiber optic cables. A subset of the electrician profession, but not always lumped in the same category, includes the installers of fire alarms, computers, and phone lines.
An electrician must learn how to wire electricity so that just the right amount of power is distributed throughout a building or item. Too little power can cause service disruptions and too much power can cause electrical fire. A lot of responsibility rests with an electrician and so the salary is somewhat attractive, to reflect the amount of work that the electrician must perform, from planning to building to maintenance.
An electrician typically learns on-the-job through an apprenticeship, which is a paid period of three to five years in which the apprentice learns from an electrician who’s been in the field for a lot longer. However, electrician training typically also involves some educational classes and certification. Many companies employing electricians and apprentices even pay for these classes. Just be aware that you’ll make less as an electrician apprentice than you would as a fully-qualified electrician, but if you compare the training to that of many other professions, in which you pay to go to school while training, an electrician apprenticeship can be quite attractive.