by Mike Mulvihill

 Ask most electric utility companies about the items high on their priority list and you may be surprised to find out that hiring people is way up there. Think about the folks you know who work at the local electric utility company. They’re likely older with decades of experience with that company.

 According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the retiring of baby boomers will create many job opportunities in the utility industry. In fact, per the Edison Electric Institute, over 100,000 jobs will need to be filled in the next eight years – that’s about one in every five jobs in the sector. And those jobs – many which require a college degree and/or technical background – are well suited to the skills of returning veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. There is even a program, The Troops to Energy Jobs initiative, which launched in 2011, specifically to attract thousands of veterans with the skills that can be applied to the energy industry’s pressing needs.

 No, these aren’t green economy jobs. They’re traditional electric power generation, transmission and distribution jobs, like engineers, linemen, maintenance workers and the like. But they are jobs that have lots of security and pay well – a combination that can be hard to find these days.

 And, with increasing concerns about potential terrorist attacks upon America’s power grid, perhaps having former soldiers watching over our electric infrastructure could make a lot of sense.

 Photo: Today’s Senior Network