Recent Grads: Your Natural Gas Utility Wants You!
Happy June, and congratulations to all recent graduates and their parents! As high school and college graduates alike make their way into the workforce, finding the right place to start their careers can feel overwhelming. If you’re looking for a job that provides stability, room for advancement throughout your career, great pay, interesting and exciting responsibilities, and a mission of serving your community, you (or, for the parents, your young recent graduate) should set your eyes on your local natural gas utility.
What makes natural gas utilities such appealing places to work? No matter what you’re interested in, you can find a job that’s a great fit for you and your talents. Are you great with technology? There’s a job waiting for you operating drones and advanced ground vehicles or interpreting satellite data to help monitor the pipelines that supply the energy your community relies on. If you’re an expert with computers, you might find that working to continue to harden cybersecurity infrastructure against all threats is more fulfilling as you work to ensure that the energy people depend on is protected.
If you’re someone who takes pride in being able to see the physical impact of your accomplishments, consider becoming a technician, working to install the infrastructure that provides your friends and neighbors with warm spaces and hot water during the winter, the energy to cook their favorite meals, and natural gas to fuel the power plants that keep your lights and air conditioning on. You’ll have the chance to do vital work that keeps your community safe. You don’t have to be an engineer to be in the natural gas industry – but if you are or are studying to become one, perhaps designing and improving those systems is right for you.
Natural gas utilities are a key part of your community. Those with great people skills might find a niche on the customer service side of operations, helping people set up service and find programs to best meet their needs and help lower their bils. Alternatively, maybe you’re interested in a communications role, where you’ll keep your community in the loop on everything from preparing for and recovering from natural disasters, to programs your utility creates to benefit customers.
Natural gas utilities invest in their workforce. You’ll be a skilled expert and paid accordingly. You can typically expect comprehensive benefits, and opportunities for training and certifications that will give you valuable, marketable skills.
However, you’ll likely find what many natural gas utility employees have already learned: with unbounded opportunities for advancement, great pay, and meaningful and fulfilling work, you can spend your entire career at the same organization where you started. You wouldn’t by any stretch be the first CEO with a story about their first day in an entry level job at the organization they were eventually chosen to lead.
If this sounds interesting to you, take a look at job postings from your local natural gas utility and see if this is the right career for you.