Reported By: Susan Sharon

It may be one of the best kept job-retraining secrets in Maine. It offers an attractive benefits package and good pay and the training program itself is free. And it’s being held up as a model for how business, education and labor can help strengthen the new economy.

Stacey Timberlake of Lisbon Falls didn’t plan on becoming an electrician. She originally got a teaching degree in elementary education. And when her son was born nine years ago Timberlake became a stay-at-home mom. To supplement her income, she eventually started waitressing on the side.

One day some of her customers started talking about Local 567′s Joint Apprenticeship Training program, how it was good to have an aptitude for math, which Timberlake did, and how you were virtually guaranteed a job. Timberlake went down and filled out an application.

The next thing she knew, she was enrolled in a five-year program to become what’s known as an “inside wireman.”
“I think we do about 980 hours of classroom time and 10,000 hours of work time before we finish the program. We have to work 2,000 hours a year. You work Monday through Friday – a 7:00 to 3:30 schedule with the rest of the journeymen.”

Classroom training takes place a couple of nights a week in the IBEW’s training center in Lewiston. And just about everything is free. Apprentices are responsible for their books and their tools for the job. Participating electrical contractors pay for the rest. That’s because they’re looking for skilled labor, people who can literally hit the ground running.

Timberlake is beginning her fourth year in the program. She says she had just four months of classroom training when she went on her first job. “My first day on the job site was horrible,” she laughs. “It was so cold and the heater in the van didn’t work. My bottle of water froze – but I learned a lot and I mean — it was a residential job my first time and we were pulling wire and they’re very patient with you. And you have kind of a level of what you’re expected to know with each year.”

Susan Sharon: “When you get done what will you be qualified to do?”

Stacey Timberlake: “When I’m done I can work residential, commercial and industrial. I can be a foreman, a journeyman, I could do jobs on my own.”

SS: “You’ll be an electrician?”

ST: “Yup.”

Timberlake expects to earn much more than she did as a teacher. And she’s already getting benefits. Once she’d worked 500 hours on the job those kicked in. And the contractor she’s working for right now is contributing to her pension plan. Apprentices can also train to do shorter, three-year programs in residential applications or for teledata, installing lines for telephones and computers.

This year there are 71 apprentices, but some years the program swells to as many as 120. “Eighty-five percent of the folks who come into this facility graduate and of those 90 percent are placed immediately into jobs,” says Rob Brown, Executive Director of Opportunity Maine, a non-profit and advocacy program that supports workforce development.

And in a way that makes sense for displaced mill workers and others who might not be interested in devoting the next four years of their lives and their bank accounts to a college degree program. “Very little public money goes into this. This is supported by the contractors themselves. These students are not paying tuition to go here. It’s an earn while you learn strategy of education and work.”

And it’s one that Brown thinks can be replicated in other fields, like health care, for instance, through the help of pending legislation in Congress that’s sponsored in the Senate by Maine Senator Olympia Snowe and co-sponsored in the House by Maine Congressman Mike Michaud.

Recently, Michaud paid a visit to the IBEW’s apprenticeship program in Lewiston, where he spoke about the Sectors Act, which would provide grants of up to $2.5 million for stakeholder partners to train workers. “It really is a game-changer and it brings business, unions, educators and the public workforce to grow and save an entire industry.”

Michaud says it could also help Maine foster new industries too. As an example, supporters point to the IBEW apprenticeship training program where several students worked on the Kibby Mountain windpower project installing 20 wind turbines over the summer. By the time they’ve completed their training, students will also have skills to install solar panels as well, something that could be a factor for clean energy developers as they consider project sites around the country.