Electricians are in high demand as baby boomers retire and data centre construction booms. It’s a perfect storm that’s driving up demand for electricians in Wyoming while also raising their wages.
Master electrician Josh Ryan, an instructor in Laramie County Community College’s Business, Agriculture and Technology Department, says he’s seeing an increase in interest in programs like his as word spreads about this lucrative career field.
“There’s a huge demand for electricians building data centres,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “Data farming and data centres have grown rapidly, particularly in southern Wyoming.
“Land, water, and utilities are all relatively cheap. So, a lot of big names have come to our backyard, and the demand for these data centres is extremely high.”
Jerry Payne from International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 322 told Cowboy State Daily that he has a project in Kemmerer that will require 540 electricians. Truett Thompson, his counterpart from Local IBEW 415, requires an additional 400 to 500 electricians.
“I’ve had 400 to 500 guys building power lines the last couple of years,” Payne informed reporters. “So, it’s incredible what’s going on out there.”
Thompson added that those jobs are just the tip of the iceberg, as he and Payne have received numerous calls from prospective projects requiring several hundred more electricians.
“There’s so much working gong on in the state, it’s hard to keep track of,” according to Thompson. “We have the underground for Meta Phase 1, and our shops are looking into the second phase as well. Then there’s the possibility of a combined cycle plant coming in. That will be slightly larger than what Black Hills Energy has.”
With such high demand, most, if not all, of Ryan’s graduates have found jobs quickly.
“I would say half of my students already had jobs lined up by the time they graduated,” he told me. “I had a few students who were still looking, but I believe they were taking the summer off.
“At least 70% of my students had jobs or got started right after graduation.”
Electrical Techs Start At $65K In Cheyenne
The Bureau of Labour Statistics predicts a 23% increase in the electrical trade sector in Wyoming. While it lists the national median wage as $62,350 in 2024, up from $54,000 in 2015, Wyoming statistics appear to be better in job postings on sites such as ZipRecruiter.
With major data centres such as Meta and Microsoft taking note of the state’s favourable climate and proximity to fibre optics lines, the starting salary for a Level 1 technician at an unnamed data centre in Cheyenne ranges from $65,000 to $75,000.
The lowest listed wage on ZipRecruiter on a recent day was $23 per hour for an entry-level position at Lunavi, a data centre provider. The advertisement mentions opportunities for overtime, implying that the annual wage will be higher than expected from hourly wages alone.
Those kinds of wages have piqued the interest of students like Brandon Schroyer, a second-year electrician apprentice from Laramie, who said finding work was easy.
“My first job, they hired me on the spot with no experience,” said Schroyer, who previously attended LCCC’s Electrical Technology Program but is now completing a program paid for by his current employer.
That company later went bankrupt, but Schroyer was able to quickly find another job.
“You can easily get multiple job offers,” he told me. “And then, in between everything, I put my information on one of those recruiting websites, and I think I got four or five phone calls from companies looking for apprentices.
“So that allowed me to be a little picky. For example, this one only offers this much money, whereas this one provides more benefits.”
Growing Pains For Electrical Segment
Ryan recalls growing up in an era when students were told that the only way to make something of themselves was to attend college and earn at least a bachelor’s degree, if not a master’s or higher.
That attitude that college is better, he believes, has contributed to the perfect storm that is brewing in most trades, including the electrical sector, where he has worked for nearly a decade.
“When I started in the trade in 2015, there were still quite a few old hands who were around with a lot of knowledge,” Ryan told me. “They’d already worked 20-plus years in the industry, and they wanted to retire.”
They retired in large numbers.
The retirement cliff resulted in a workplace with far fewer people available to train new hires. That’s significant in the electrical industry because the profession requires a specific ratio of journeymen to apprentices.
“As you can imagine, you can’t have a bunch of people who really don’t know what they’re doing hooking up power,” Ryan told the crowd. “So, you have to have quite a bit of leadership and oversight to the apprenticeship aspect of things.”
Ryan’s program meets a need by providing extensive hands-on experience.
“Industry has been flooded with first-year apprentices,” Ryan informed the crowd. “They’re looking for a journeyman level, or even a second, third, or fourth year apprentice. So, I felt like we could do a lot better and reach a lot more students if we could get them some of those classroom and on-the-job hours completed before they started working.”
Earn As You Learn For Free
With so much difficulty hiring workers, companies have been raising wages and offering some enticing perks, such as earn-as-you-learn programs in which the company pays for training.
Schroyer is finishing his program this way, with an earn-to-learn program paid for by his employer. The employer also assisted him in obtaining the necessary tools, paying for some of them upfront and advancing the rest to Schroyer.
Starting wages for a new apprentice with no experience may appear to be low. Ryan, on the other hand, believes that first impressions can be misleading.
While the starting wage for someone with no experience is $20 per hour, most of these jobs offer overtime and other perks, which quickly raises the starting salary to around $80,000 per year, according to Ryan.
That’s not the whole story, though, because raises are implemented on an accelerated timeline.
“Every six months, they get a rise,” he informed me. “So usually, even the ones who aren’t over-performing or going above and beyond, they’re getting at least a dollar rise every six months.”
Once the four-year apprenticeship period is completed, those raises begin to increase even further.
“Once you get your journeyman’s licence, the sky’s really the limit,” Ryan told me. “I know guys who have gone to work for general maintenance at a hospital or school district or at a factory producing general goods,” according to him. “You can then move up to lead men or foreman level if you want to continue in the construction world.”
After 8,000 hours as a journeyman, electricians can apply to take the master electrician exam, which will allow them to obtain a contractor’s licence and start their own businesses.
A Career that Travels
One of the many appealing aspects of the electrical trade that drew Schroyer in was the prospect of starting his own business. Schroyer’s father owned his own landscaping business, and he hopes to own his own electrical business someday.
In the meantime, however, the wages and portability of the career convinced him that this was the path to take.
“My wife is a nurse, so that was one of the things I looked at,” he told me. “She could get a job anywhere in the country. So I wanted the same ability whether we decided to move or not.”
Schroyer noted that electricity affects every aspect of society in every community in America. There’s no place he could go where an electrical trade wouldn’t be beneficial.
“There’s so many different avenues to take with this career,” he told me. “I can do residential, commercial, and industrial. I could teach once I have my journeyman’s licence.”
Another aspect of the trade he enjoys is the feeling that he is making a tangible difference through the work he does.
He is currently part of a team that is lighting up a University of Wyoming stadium.
“I’m born and raised in Laramie, and this place means a lot to me,” he explained. “I get to put up these lights that the entire town will see for the next 30 years. That’s an awesome feeling.”
