Welcome to my listeners. When I began my journey in the energy industry in 2011, I found myself surrounded by mentors. Experts in their field: professionals in their forties, fifties, and sixties…who soon became my closest colleagues, clients, committee members, confidants, supporters and friends. This was not an accident nor a product of my intention: it was the product of circumstance, that this was the last or second-to-last decade in which deep subject matter experts who "grew up" with energy industry roles were still going full force— many just shy of their upcoming retirement years.
So in my early career years, I learned from and worked with large teams of such experts who had irreplaceable historical context, deep institutional memories housed in the pride-filled hearts and minds of a generation of people who had apprenticed through their entire careers — who as a result of sticking with it in their field for decades at a time, had ultimately reached retirement age as true fonts of knowledge.
The specific decade in which I started my work, is also the decade in which we began seeing an unprecedented number of retirements of advanced technical and subject matter professionals in the energy utility and service provider industries. Most of those people left the industry about eight years after I started in it: so there is a gap, as social media became the primary way to connect new entrants into the energy professional with the vault of experienced veterans of the industry just as many of those experts left the space to take well-deserved retirement vacations and shift focus. In my podcast series, we will close that gap just a bit, by inviting them to share their experience, wisdom and pride for their work powering America.
I was so darn lucky to have access to these generations every day in my place of work. And I will feel luckier still, to share some of that knowledge, experience, mindset and amazing stories with you, my listeners.
Welcome to Powering with Pride: America's Energy Voices. I am your host, a veteran of the gas utility, electric power generation, renewables, and distributed energy and storage businesses. And I'm thrilled to be here to close gaps and open minds. Thank you for listening.
Questions my guests will answer in a 20-minute format:
1. At a high level, what topics have you covered in your energy career?
2. What skills would someone need to have, to replicate the work you did? Do you think those skills can be learned outside the job?
3. Greatest moments of pride in your work?
Sountrack Credit: Someday, Alexander Delarge, https://icons8.com/music/
Podcast Content and Script Copyright: Luminary Strategies, LLC
Purposeful Podcasting: A Journey with Mentors and Experts