Beyond Participation: Continuing the Workforce Conversation
The electrical industry’s workforce challenge continues to evolve. In Beyond Recruitment: When the Market Will Not Wait, IEC member Brian Brinkmann argued that the issue is not just attracting people to the trade, but ensuring contractors and apprenticeship programs can properly train and develop them. His new paper, Beyond Participation: Rethinking Workforce Development as Occupational Stewardship, advances that conversation by asking: What should workforce development ultimately produce?
As new programs, credentials, and pathways emerge, the paper encourages the industry to look beyond participation and toward occupational competency. It does not advocate for one educational model, but instead proposes a guiding principle: Different pathways. Same standard.
Brinkmann also emphasizes the contractor’s role in developing broadly capable electricians and passing the profession’s standards, judgment, craftsmanship, and commitment to safety from one generation to the next.
IEC’s Perspective
IEC recognizes that workforce development is an ongoing and complex industry issue. Beyond Participation is not presented as a final answer or an endorsement of one pathway over another. It is intended to continue an important conversation and bring contractors, educators, apprenticeship leaders, manufacturers, workforce organizations, policymakers, and other stakeholders together to discuss the future of the electrical workforce.
Beyond Participation builds upon the discussion introduced in Beyond Recruitment: When the Market Will Not Wait.
Executive Summary
As workforce initiatives continue to expand, the electrical industry must consider whether its measures of success reflect participation or true occupational capability. Enrollment, completion, credential attainment, and job placement are important indicators, but they do not necessarily demonstrate that someone has developed the technical ability, practical judgment, safety mindset, craftsmanship, and professional responsibility expected of a broadly capable journey-level electrician.
Rather than prescribing a single educational model, the paper calls for the industry to define a shared standard of competency that can guide different pathways into the profession. It also highlights the essential role contractors play in transforming knowledge into dependable performance through supervision, field experience, mentorship, and increasing responsibility.
Ultimately, Beyond Participation reframes workforce development as occupational stewardship: the collective responsibility to preserve the profession’s standards and pass them from one generation to the next.
Download the Full Paper
Explore the complete perspective and the questions it raises for contractors, educators, workforce partners, and the broader electrical industry.
Be Part of the Conversation
To participate in the discussion or share your perspective, contact IEC Executive Director Amy Biedenharn at abiedenharn@ieci.org.