Chris Brooks has always been a hands-on person — “the kid getting the building toys.”
He is still hands-on but on a larger scale, as a fourth-year apprentice with STG Electric Services of Macedonia, OH, through IEC Northern Ohio.
As he prepares for his journeyman’s license, he is also looking toward a future of leadership and independence. He takes pride in the quality of his work, and his love of the field is inspiring his younger brothers to follow in his footsteps.
Finding the Path
By his junior year in high school, Chris felt drawn to the electrical trade, where he could make a good living doing something he loved. He researched his options, including the union based near his home, but he had a gut feeling about the IEC Northern Ohio program. With help from his mom, he applied for an apprenticeship.
“I like IEC and their contractors because they’re still fair to their guys,” he says. “With the union, you won’t learn as much because they try to stick you in one spot. If you’re a nonunion contractor, you can go all over the place. You learn something new every job.”
After graduating from high school in 2023, Chris joined STG, a provider of industrial, commercial, and residential electrical services. From the start, the classroom provided a solid foundation in terminology, codes, and safety, but “you learn more in the field than you do in the classroom.”
“The guys in the field teach you what to do,” he says. “You pick it all up as you keep moving. I’m not going to learn how to bend pipe and pull wire in the classroom. You’re going to learn the actual skills in the field. You’re going to learn how to use the tools. You’re going to learn how to read the blueprints.”
On any job, the “why” is as important as the “what.”
“It’s not mindless work,” he says. “It could be that we are working on shutting power off to this specific portion of the building so the demo guys don’t hurt themselves, or we need this size breaker for this panel so nothing catches on fire. Maybe I’m bending the pipe a certain way so that it still looks aesthetically clean but fits in the spot where I need it to go. Make it look professional. Make it look nice.”
Chris had to overcome a slow start. At first, he wasn’t quite catching on, but in his third year, “it all clicked, and it’s just making sense now. I’ll still do stupid stuff all the time. Everyone makes mistakes. I’m really, really grateful that they stuck with me.”
He remembers getting the hang of the work during a job at a farm store. He was doing saddles, offsets, and rolling offsets while he improved his pipe bending, and no one was breathing down his neck and demanding that he redo it.
“Caring about your work is so important in this field,” he says. “It’s not just an aesthetics thing. If you want it to work well and last well, make sure your connections are tight and make it look like it belongs there.”
An Eye on Leadership
Chris hopes to pass the test and have his journeyman’s license this year. “From there, the world is my oyster, pretty much,” he says.
He enjoys the commercial work he usually does, renovating and rewiring existing grocery stores, retailers, and warehouses. Someday, he would like to run his own jobs, and his IEC Northern Ohio apprenticeship is already planting the seed. His third-year teacher taught lessons in costing materials and staying organized.
In the field, Chris pays attention to the foremen, sometimes thinking about how he would do things differently. When he’s told a deadline for a task, he keeps that date in mind.
“I will remember how important it is,” he says. “It could cost the company a lot of money if it’s late.”
He has reached a point where the foreman assigns him to oversee first-year apprentices. The kind of leadership skills he’ll need for running jobs, he is learning, is “way more difficult to have than I realized.”
“You think about the reasons why you’re having people do things and wanting to be patient if they make a mistake or don’t do something,” he says. “If you see them doing something wrong or making them work way harder than they need to be, you can tell them how to make it easier. Show them how you would do it, and make your life easier and their life easier, too. Display the knowledge you have.”
Brotherly Advice
Chris has two brothers in Florida, ages 18 and 16. As they approach career junctures, they look up to their big brother for guidance.
“They ask me what I think about what I do,” he says. “I tell them I really enjoy it, and they say, ‘But it’s dangerous.’ I tell them that’s why there are safety precautions. It’s only unsafe if you are acting unsafe.”
His enthusiasm has convinced them to think about careers as electricians — maybe even applying for IEC Northern Ohio apprenticeships. Whatever they do, Chris hopes that “they just love it.”
“Life is too short to be doing something that is not valuable and is boring,” he says. “If they like it, awesome; keep sticking with it. If they don’t like it, that’s fine, but find something you want to be in. It’d be really cool to get to work with them one day. Can you imagine if we’d all be on the same job?”
Chris is also a musician who has been playing guitar for eight years. He got out of the performing scene — a little too much drama, he says — and now prefers to play for himself and write his own music.
Naturally, he gets hands-on work with guitars, too. Electric guitars have a different kind of wiring than commercial buildings, but as he notes, “I’m still working with wires. I like bringing it all together and seeing it work.”
He also taught his brothers to play guitar. “They are my little minions, for sure,” he says with a laugh.
Power With Purpose
Chris hopes to grow his career with STG Electric, learning as much as he can, gaining status, and running jobs.
“The company is growing a lot,” he says. “They’ve been pretty good to me.”
Most of all, he likes “being able to make something that actually has purpose in the world and helps people every day. Everyone needs to be able to see. Everyone needs to be able to power what they need to power. It means a lot that I know how to do that.”
And at the end of a job, he loves seeing it all come together.
“If I finish a warehouse lighting job and I turn all the lights on, and it works perfectly, that’s great,” he says. “Or I’ll revisit a grocery store I did a year ago, and if someone is with me, I’ll say, ‘You see that light right there? I did that.’”