Oregon Department of Transportation, Utilities Step Up Recruiting at Trades Fair

By Libby Tucker

Height doesn’t faze Cristi Dyami, although she looks a little concerned for the middle school girls she’s helping to scale a utility pole. The apprentice lineman digs her gaffs into the wood like a pro, locks her knees and swings her weight to dangle from the pole. The girls, however, struggle with the task.

“It’s pretty hard when you’re learning, but once you learn, it gets easy,” Dyami tells the girls attending the Oregon Tradeswomen’s 16th annual Women in Trades career fair held last week at the NECA/ IBEW electrical training center in Northeast Portland.

Dyami will graduate this month to become the first female journeyman lineman at the Bonneville Power Administration. And she hopes to inspire other young women to follow her upward career path by first encouraging them to climb a pole, she says.

More than 1,200 middle-school and high-school girls from Oregon and Southwest Washington participated in the three-day event, which started on Thursday and opened to the public on Saturday. The fair brought together skilled workers in a variety of crafts, including electricians, plumbers, builders and emergency responders to demonstrate their skills and give the girls hands-on experience in the trades.

The region’s electric utilities made a much bigger showing at the fair this year than they have in the past, said Connie Ashbrook, executive director of Oregon Tradeswomen. Portland General Electric, the Bonneville Power Administration and Pacificorp all made appearances along with the fair’s first out-of-state recruiter, the Colorado-based Western Area Power Administration.

“We’ve got vacancies,” Will Schnyer, a line foreman with the Western Area Power Administration, said. “We haven’t had the exposure to women and minorities, and the fair gives us a chance to explain the opportunities for electricians, linemen, meter and relay, and communications technicians.”

Facing a shortage of line workers and other skilled craftsmen, utilities have stepped up their recruitment efforts of women and minorities, Maureen Shaw, a supervisor of workforce planning for PGE, said.

As in years past, PGE set up utility poles for the girls to climb, offered rides in its bucket trucks and gave girls a chance to try working with hot sticks on a mock power line. The goal is to pique their interest enough that they’ll consider electric utility work, Shaw said.

“We take a photo of them (in the pole gear) and put it in a frame so they can literally visualize themselves in these careers,” she said.

The Oregon Department of Transportation also made its first appearance at the fair, part of a new partnership with Oregon Tradeswomen to boost the number of women and minorities in the heavy highway trades, Ashbrook said. A crew of women highway workers demonstrated some of ODOT’s key equipment, including a crane truck, an incident response truck and electronic road signs.

A traffic light dangling from the crane truck captured the most ooh’s and ahh’s from the middle school girls attending on Thursday.

“It’s bigger than I thought it was,” said Danielle Johnson, a sixth grader at Boise-Elliot Elementary School in Portland.

Johnson was one of several girls taking turns raising and lowering the traffic light using the crane’s hand-held controls. Operating the crane was “cool”, Johnson said, and she would definitely think about a career in highway work.

Most of the girls who tried climbing the utility pole with BPA’s Cristi Dyami also said they thought it was “cool”, though they said they wouldn’t want to do it as a job.

“It hurts your knees, and it’s hard,” Selena Garcia, a seventh grade student at Adam Stevens Middle School in Salem, said.

But for some girls, the experience sticks. Journeyman lineman Lorra Crumley remembers attending the Women in Trades Fair 10 years ago as a young, single mom with four kids. Through Oregon Tradeswomen she landed an apprenticeship and was recruited to work for PGE at the Women in Trades Fair. Now she volunteers for the fair every year, hoping that her story will inspire other young moms to enter the trade.

“I want them to know you can do good in your life,” Crumley said.

Originally published by Libby Tucker.

(c) 2008 Daily Journal of Commerce (Portland, OR). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.