Yall need a job

I went from tech researcher to electrician at age 40 and have never been happier--and so can you!

TLDR:

Have you recently lost your desk job because of AI or the economy? You should consider becoming an electrician! It is immensely satisfying work, and don’t worry, within a few short years you’ll catch up on pay. This is the right move for you if you have the following qualities:

• You have some mechanical inclination (you’re “handy”)

• You like to solve puzzles

• You are detail-oriented and like to learn

There are some caveats:

• You don’t need to be a perfect physical specimen, but you have to be in decent enough shape to climb ladders, squeeze pliers, etc.

• As with any career change there will be a dip in pay at first, so you need to be able to get by for a few years with a reduced income. Best if you don’t have a $600 car payment and so on.

I can only speak from my own experience, but so far mine has been tremendously positive. In addition to the above traits, if you are halfway presentable and can show up on time your new career could literally begin tomorrow. It’s (almost) never too late!

Why I’m writing:

Since I started electricianing just before my 40th birthday I’ve felt a vague urge to write down how I got into this line of work and what it means to me, but I didn’t really know who to write it for or why I should write at all, so my thoughts were just tossed onto a growing chaotic heap for months.

Only recently did I conceive of an organizing principle to these ideas: there are probably many people like myself to whom it would never have occurred to enter the trades, and electrical work in particular, but who would nevertheless excel at it, and do a lot of good both for themselves and for the world by switching careers. Besides, I want more coworkers with interesting backgrounds.

As I write this I am a little over half a year in, and it is the most fun and comprehensively satisfying work I’ve ever done. In a few years the compensation will be comparable to what I was making in my previous career, and will eventually surpass it, but for now I am already doing something that feels much more worthwhile for myself and for society while providing me plenty to live on.

That is the sales pitch, but it requires some explanations and caveats, and the only way I know to provide these is by telling my story.

My background:

Most of my electrician colleagues appear to have entered the trades young and had older family members in the trades to set an example and show the way, so my journey here is unlikely but perhaps it might serve as an example and show the way to those like me who didn’t know one was even there. Here is a brief rundown:

I come from a family of classical artists. A few people in my family are “handy” but none make a living in the trades. Growing up in Cleveland, the adults in my house looked at the ability to turn a screwdriver with a kind of awe. Tradesmen were seen as sort of noble beasts—coarse men with rough hands who could do wonders with material and fix unfixable problems around your house, but who you’d never want to spend time with otherwise.

My whimsical teenage desire to earn money through sheer self-expression was encouraged rather than tempered with caution by the adults around me, so after graduating from college I scraped by in the film industry for half a decade or so. I did just about every behind-the-camera job you can name and eventually specialized as an editor and visual effects artist in Hollywood. Finally I was hired as the video editor at an e-learning company in San Diego.

There, surrounded by engineering and innovation, I became interested in industrial design, took an online class and read a few books, then made a few video prototypes of imaginary products and tried to market myself as a specialist in video prototypes. Eventually I was hired by a connection from my college days at a startup in Ohio, a brilliant guy whom I’d helped with a project for his master’s degree in human factors engineering.

At first I thought he’d hired me as a video producer but soon realized he intended to make me a human factors engineer as well—the person who actually discovers users’ needs and designs the product—and so, a decade into my adulthood, my first career change was complete. From there I soon specialized in research.

That work (typically referred to as”UX”) put me at the intersection of technology, anthropology, and organizational psychology despite no formal education in any of those fields. Still, I flourished. My next ten years as a human factors researcher were fun and interesting—I grew professionally, presented at conferences and usergroups, and even published papers—but when I got to the corporate world I also found the work to be less than fulfilling.

I was frequently asked to pull confident conclusions out of skimpy data; projects usually dragged on for months and years before dying in unseen boardrooms; sometimes managers or project coordinators were basically absent and I was left without direction or feedback. I experienced long stretches of frustration and bewilderment at how I could be paid so much to be so unsupported and ignored. (I know lots of other tech workers can relate to this; I believe that many large corporations simply don’t know how to utilize their employees.)

Correspondingly, I was laid off three times from three different companies. The first two layoffs, in 2017 and 2020 respectively, lasted about 3 months each and both ended with me finding a new job for more money, initiating an even deeper cycle of frustration and bewilderment. So when I was laid off a third time in September 2023, I shrugged and took it as a welcome break: a chance to sleep in and spend more time with my kids until the next big gig fell into my lap.

My gateway to the trades:

I’d been interested in architecture for a long time, always peering out at interesting-looking houses as I drove around. I’d also begun hungrily absorbing information on how houses get built, the systems they’re composed of and how those systems work. I just found the whole thing fascinating and had a notion I’d like to build my own house someday.

When I was about to buy my first house in 2016 I got it inspected, and thus learned there was a job where you could get paid to check out houses. I thought it would be the perfect weekend hobby for me. But it remained just a back-burner idea until that last layoff in late 2023, when I finally looked into it and convinced my wife it was a good time for me to take the training. Besides, I told her, I could switch over to inspecting houses full-time whenever I was laid off from my human factors work in the future.

So I got the training, passed my exams, and got my home inspector license in March of 2024. I decided to try to work for a multi-inspector firm rather than hang up my own shingle, because that path offered more flexibility and fewer overhead costs (my firm covered insurance, tools, and state-mandated continuing education, not to mention the whole business side of things)—perfect for someone who wanted to just do a few inspections on weekends but be able to easily dial it up to full-time now and then during a layoff. Through a connection at my home inspector school, I got an interview with a local franchise of a national home inspection firm and was hired on the spot.

The difference between that experience and how my full-time job search was going could not have been more stark: when I didn’t find a new UX role by month three, I started drastically widening my net, lowering my compensation expectations, and working with more and more recruiters. By the time my unemployment benefits ran out in late spring of 2024 I’d applied for hundreds of UX roles and totally revamped my website and resume but had managed to get only a handful of interviews. Each interview was eventually followed by the dreaded “Thank you but” email. My LinkedIn feed, which I’d begun to check obsessively, told me that a lot of people in my field were experiencing the same thing, if not worse. The whole industry was in a slump (and for all I know, still is). People with multiple PhDs, decades of experience, and the snazziest imaginable websites and resumes were having trouble finding work.

By mid-summer I began to suspect I was never going to get a job in UX again. It was a heavy realization for a guy who’d become accustomed over the past decade to supporting his wife and three kids, paying a mortgage, saving aggressively, and enjoying the lifestyle afforded by an income that had climbed into the six-figure range.

Meanwhile I was inspecting a handful of houses per week (in most multi-inspector firms, the newest hires get booked for inspections only after the old-timers’ schedules are filled) and it did not seem viable to me as a new full-blown career. Inspecting houses was not difficult, and the written and verbal communication aspect of it was fulfilling, but even if I could climb the seniority ladder and start conducting enough inspections to be full-time, the work involved long hours with lots of driving for pay that was middling at best. There didn’t appear to be anywhere to go with it: inspecting houses for 20 years is the same in terms of professional status as doing it for six months, and there are only so many additional services an inspector can add on to make more money. Even the thrill of experiencing residential architecture was wearing off—it turns out most houses are built in a fairly boring and conservative way to a limited number of plans, or else they’re optimized for photographing well at the expense of just about everything else.

One thing home inspecting did for me, however, was to deepen my understanding beyond simply the systems and subsystems a house is composed of. I began to comprehend why those systems take the form they do and how they are manufactured and put together, and how and why they’ve changed over the years. When I came across variations in framing or plumbing or foundations, I could see them as clues that tell the story of how a house was built, or the larger story of how houses were built in that given time and place by a specific builder. The trades were becoming demystified to me, and they also took on an air of attainability: they started looking more and more like something I could do.

I should mention here that despite having spent the bulk of my adulthood in careers that mostly involved sitting at a computer, working with my hands had always appealed to me and I was not exactly a stranger to it. Listing out my experiences up to that point looks something like this:

• As a kid I was inquisitive and mechanically inclined, even beyond the rather common boyhood obsession with Legos and Erector Sets; in first or second grade I used a tiny screwdriver to completely take apart my little mechanical alarm clock gear by gear, out of sheer curiosity—and to my delight it still worked again at the end when I reversed the process.

• My grandfather, who was somewhat of a tinkerer, introduced me to the basics of woodworking and other household tool use. When we’d get a new piece of furniture or anything else requiring assembly, I was typically dispatched by the adults to put it together.

• In the summer during junior high I mowed lawns for neighbors.

• In high school one of my friend’s parents bought a house to flip, and I helped with some basics like demolition, painting, and drywall repair.

• My first car, a $400 pile of junk in the shape of a 1991 Chevy Celebrity, forced me to learn a bit about automotive maintenance and repair.

• The year after I moved out on my own at 18, I worked as a helper to a handyman and a house painter.

• Later, that experience helped get me a job at an art gallery where I was frequently helping to install art exhibits, and then after they’d run their course, taking them back down and applying mud and paint to prepare the gallery for the next installation.

• My first career in the film industry included a significant portion of time working on grip and lighting crews: driving trucks and hauling gear in and out of them, setting up and tearing down equipment, using hand tools, etc.

• I’d always taken a DIY approach to maintaining or modifying the houses I lived in.

• By my late 30s my woodworking skills had gradually accumulated to where I was building furniture with proper glued joints, and had even recently (as of 2023) built a very nice electric guitar for myself.

• Long ago I’d realized that the endorphin rush of building or fixing something tangible was one of the best sensations I knew.

So although I was never a master craftsman, the feeling of a drill or pliers in my hand, and the thrill of stopping a leaking pipe or fixing a broken piece of equipment, or of turning raw material into an intentional shape, was not alien to me. And now it was starting to look like something it never had before: a way for me to earn real money—not “one-bedroom rent and bus fare” money like when I was in my teens and early 20s but a way to actually support my family and pay my mortgage.

By late summer of 2024 our emergency savings were nearing depletion. Home inspecting had only slowed the bleeding. My wife studied our budget carefully and discovered exactly how little we could live on. Her job as an administrator at a local university was not enough by itself to cover all our finances, but she figured out I did not need to be pulling in even half of what I was making before for us to get by. In fact, because we’d also figured out how to live very inexpensively, we could be quite comfortable and still save for the future even if I earned only $20 an hour. Which was, I realized, probably what I’d be making at first if I started over as a tradesman’s apprentice. That realization was a huge weight off my shoulders.

Encouraged by my experience being hired so quickly as a home inspector (a few basic skills plus the ability to show up on time and communicate in a clear professional manner was, evidently, a veritable guarantee of a job right away in the trades) I decided to go for it and change careers. I abandoned my search for UX jobs and started searching for what I could do with my hands.

How I settled on electrical work:

At first I looked in all directions. I reached out to a random gunsmith who showed up in my vicinity on Google maps (he did not respond). I got through two rounds of interviews as a warranty claim assessor/repair coordinator for DR Horton (basically the Walmart of home builders; they ultimately ghosted me). I looked into being a solar installer (I learned that specialty is almost nonexistant where I live).

Then I thought some more. I was almost 40 years old, and although I had stayed in shape by weightlifting, I was not as scrappy as when I was 20. I also had three kids, a mortgage, and a wife with a career, so I needed a job where I could still be around to help raise the kids, take care of the house, be a present husband, and make decent money. And speaking of which: starting over completely at age 40 meant I needed some assurance of being able, within a few years, to get back to something approaching my previous earning power.

Somewhere I’d heard electricians earned the most out of all the trades. I also had a sense that electricians did the least crawling around in muck and had the least heavy gear to lug around. (These things turned out to be mostly true, or true with some exceptions.) But one thing that cemented my choice more than anything else was a recollection of all the handy DIYers I’d met who, when talking about some project or other they’d just finished, would say some version of “I did everything but the electric. I don’t touch electric.”

In fact I’d always considered myself in that same category. I didn’t really understand electrical currents, and couldn’t keep volts/watts/amps/etc. straight in my head, and really I was sort of afraid of electricity. When I mentioned those things to people who’d done some electrical tinkering they’d say something like “Yeah, I’m scared of it too” or “That’s good, you should be afraid of it!” So I was also someone who was willing to be hands-on with everything except electric.

Yet, clearly somebody works with electric. Why not me? I’d hired an electrician a few times over the years and he was a smart and interesting person, too. I thought, I could be like him! (That particular electrician had mostly retired from service work since the last time I hired him, but he encouraged me to pursue the trade.)

On a whim I did a search for electricians whose businesses were based within a few miles’ radius of my house. About 50% of them had navigable websites with a way to reach out by email or by filling out a form. Of those, about half a dozen inspired confidence that they might reply to a message. I reached out to them with a note that went something like this:

Hi, I'd like to know if you would be willing to take on a dependable, teachable, and professional apprentice. I am currently working part-time as a home inspector, looking to begin a new career as an electrician.

I have had previous careers in the film/TV industry and most recently in tech. I also have informal experience with trades work, from various jobs I had in my teens and 20s, and from being a 3-time homeowner and DIYer.

I am reliable, have a dependable car, am physically fit, and have some basic tools. I can be reached by email or text message: [contact info]. Even if you are not looking for help, I am interested in any advice or wisdom you might offer about becoming an electrician.

I hope we can talk soon.

Best wishes,

-Nadav Zohar

I never heard back from any of them—except one, who emailed me the very next day asking to arrange an in-person interview. That exchange, with the man who is now my employer, set my life on a new course, one I am still on and so excited about that I felt I had to write this.

My boss:

By default I try to give people their privacy, and my boss is a private person, so I don’t want to blow up his spot. I’ll just give these details: he is my age, has been doing electrical work since he was a teenager, started his own business seven years ago, and for almost that entire time only aspired to be a one-man shop. The story of how he came around to the idea of taking on an employee merely one month before I reached out to him is filled with enough serendipity to make the most hard-eyed materialist question whether there might be a magnificent order to the universe. Suffice to say, we are glad we found each other.

Importantly, my boss is a great teacher, both through the actual means by which he gives instruction and through the example by which he leads. He has taught me not just how to use the tools to do the tasks of electrical work, but how to move and think efficiently on a jobsite, and how to employ my creative faculties to maximize the quality of my work—planning conduit runs, replacing devices in a strategic order, and so on.

In six months I had already learned enough from him to begin taking on small side jobs, but also much about how the business side of things works and, most critically, how to forge the relationships that allow a small business to thrive rather than suffocate. My boss is the embodiment of integrity and he inspires me to keep learning and growing. I owe this chapter of my life to him.

And best of all we get along marvelously, which is good because we are together nearly every day, all day.

A defining moment:

There’s a lot else I could write about being an electrician, but it’s mostly either stuff that’s particular to my situation or general information you could probably get just as well from a web search. (Maybe some other time I’ll get into my thoughts on various tools and equipment, or how I relate to the culture of the tradesmen around me, etc.) Instead, the last impression I want to leave you with is a vignette, an event that happened during my first few weeks on the job.

My boss and I were working in the basement of a small medical facility. The elevator was out of service (we were updating its fire alarm system or something like that, I can’t remember) so patients were walking down the stairs and through a hallway to their clinic. I was tasked with pulling a data wire over a drop ceiling, from the elevator room at one end of the hallway to a mechanical room at the other end.

The building was old and the hallway was dingy. Every ceiling tile I lifted sent a cascade of loose insulation and mouse droppings tumbling out on top of me, a disgusting confetti shower. By the time I got that wire down the hall, through a drywall hole, and landed it at its destination in the mechanical room, I was covered in filth and had made quite a mess on the floor.

Patients continued to shuffle this way and that through the hallway from the stairwell to one of the basement offices, occasionally stopping to ask me if I was there fixing the elevator. They varied in age, but most of them gave the impression of being old and frail. As he was handing me a small portable vacuum cleaner so I could clean up my mess, my boss quietly pointed out that the office they were coming and going from was a methodone clinic.

The vacuum cleaner was the size of a 2-liter bottle, so it made no sense to use it standing up. So there I was on my knees on the dirty basement floor of a methodone clinic hallway, vacuuming up pearlite beads and rodent poop while recovering junkies shuffled past me unenviously.

And something happened.

I think it was because of my literal and figurative posture at that moment. My groundedness to the earth and my humble foothold in the society around me. I felt honest and pure, uncomplicated. I was filled with overpowering euphoria. I was buzzing. The feeling was one of serenity, bliss.

It lasted the rest of the day and I can still recall it vividly. I knew then I had made the right career choice, and I haven’t looked back.

If you’d told me a year ago that I’d become a full-time electrician I would not have believed it, but already it feels like a job that fits me like a broken-in pair of work boots.

Our society is changing, and the ways of making a living are changing with it. By opening their minds, I think many people could discover a way to be fulfilled and more than cover their living expenses even if right now their options seem bleak. I hope my story will alert people to the possibility of great rewards in unexpected places.