Employment Boom: Wyoming Unions Say Thousands Of Electricians Needed

The sparks are flying for electricians, thanks to retiring baby boomers and a boom in the construction of data centers. It’s a perfect storm that is creating high demand for electricians, while also increasing their wages in Wyoming.

Master electrician Josh Ryan, an instructor in the Business, Agriculture and Tech Department of Laramie County Community College, said he’s seeing a surge in interest for programs like his as word spreads about this lucrative career field.

“There’s a huge demand for electricians building data centers,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “Data farming and data centers have really blown up, especially in the southern Wyoming area.

“Land is relatively cheap, water is relatively cheap and utilities are relatively cheap. So, there’s been a lot of big names who have come to our local backyard, and the demand for building these data centers is extreme.”

Jerry Payne with International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 322 told Cowboy State Daily he has a project in Kemmerer that will need 540 electricians. His counterpart with Local IBEW 415, Truett Thompson, needs another 400 to 500 electricians. 

“I’ve had 400 to 500 guys building power lines the last couple of years,” Payne said. “So, it’s incredible what’s going on out there.”

Those jobs are just the tip of the iceberg, Thompson added, saying that both he and Payne have had numerous calls from prospective projects that will need several hundred more electricians as well. 

“There’s so much working going on in the state, it’s hard to keep track of,” Thompson said. “We’ve got the underground on Meta Phase 1 and our shops are looking at the second phase of that too. Then we’ve got the potential for a combined cycle plant that’s coming in. That will be a little bit bigger than what Black Hills energy has.”

That kind of demand has made job prospects hot and fast for most, if not all of Ryan’s graduates. 

“I would say half of my students already had jobs lined up by the time they graduated,” he said. “I did have a couple students who were still kind of looking, but I think they were taking the summer off.

“At least 70% of my students had jobs or got started right after graduation.”

Electrical Techs Start At $65K In Cheyenne

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates 23% growth in the electrical trade sector for Wyoming. While it lists median wages nationally as $62,350 in 2024, up from $54,000 in 2015, Wyoming stats look better in job postings at places like ZipRecruiter. 

With major data centers like Meta and Microsoft taking note of the state’s ideal climate and proximity to fiber optics lines, the starting wage for a Level 1 technician at an unnamed data center in Cheyenne startsbetween $65,000 to $75,000. 

The lowest listed wage on a recent day on ZipRecruiter was $23 an hour for an entry-level position at data center provider Lunavi. The ad mentions opportunities for overtime, suggesting the annual wage would be higher than expected from hourly wages alone.

Those kinds of wages have been attractive to students like Brandon Schroyer, a second-year electrician apprentice from Laramie, who said finding work was a snap for him.

“My first job, they hired me on the spot with zero experience,” said Schroyer, who first attended LCCC’s Electrical Technology Program, but is now finishing up at a program paid for by his present employer. 

That company ran into trouble later, but Schroyer easily found a new job when the time came. 

“You can easily get multiple job offers,” he said. “And then, in between everything, I’ve had my information on one of those recruiting sites, and I think I had four or five phone calls from companies wanting apprentices.

“So that allowed me to be a little choosy. Like, this one’s only offering this much money, or this one has better benefits.”

Growing Pains For Electrical Segment

Ryan remembers growing up at a time when students were told the only way to make something of themselves was to go to college and get at least a bachelor’s degree, if not master’s or better. 

That attitude that college is better has, he sees it, contributed to the perfect storm that’s brewing in most of the trades, including the electrical sector that he’s been part of for about a decade. 

“When I started in the trade in 2015, there were still quite a few old hands who were around with a lot of knowledge,” Ryan said. “They’d already worked 20-plus years in the industry, and they wanted to retire.”

Retire they did, in large numbers.

That retirement cliff left a workplace with far fewer people available to train new recruits. That’s a big deal in the electrical industry, because the profession requires a certain ratio of journeymen to apprentices. 

“As you can imagine, you can’t have a bunch of people who really don’t know what they’re doing hooking up power,” Ryan said. “So, you have to have quite a bit of leadership and oversight to the apprenticeship aspect of things.”

Ryan’s program helps address a need by providing a lot of hands-on experience.

“Industry has been flooded with first-year apprentices,” Ryan said. “They’re desperate for a journeyman level, or even a second-, third-, fourth-year apprentice. So, I felt like we could do a lot better and have a lot more students who could benefit from it, if we could get them some of those classroom hours and those on-the-job hours knocked out before they even jumped into work.”

Earn As You Learn For Free

With so much difficulty hiring workers, companies have been bumping up wages and offering some juicy perks, including earn-as-you-learn programs, where the company is paying the costs of training.

Schroyer is finishing up his program that way, with an earn-to-learn program his employer is paying for. The employer also helped him get the tools he needed, paying for some of what was needed outright, and advancing Schroyer the rest.

Starting wages for a new apprentice with no experience at first glance may sound low. But first looks are misleading, Ryan said.

While the starting wage for someone with no experience is $20 an hour, most of these jobs do come with the opportunity for overtime, as well as many other perks, which quickly brings the starting salary level up to more like $80,000 annually, Ryan said. 

That’s not the whole story either though, because raises kick in on an accelerated timetable.

“Every six months, they get a raise,” he said. “So usually, even the ones who aren’t over-performing or going above and beyond, they’re getting at least a dollar raise every six months.”

Those raises start to go up even more once the four-year apprenticeship period ends.

“Once you get your journeyman’s license, the sky’s really the limit,” Ryan said. “I know guys who have gone to work for general maintenance at a hospital or school district or at a factory producing general goods,” he said. “You can then move up to lead men or foreman level if you want to continue in the construction world.”

After 8,000 hours as a journeyman, electricians are then eligible to apply to take the master electrician exam, and from there, they can get a contractor’s license to start their own businesses.

A Career That Travels

Starting his own business someday was one of several attractive features of the electrical trade that attracted Schroyer. His dad owned his own business as a landscaper, and Schroyer would someday like to own his own electrical business as well. 

In the meantime, though, the wages and the portability of the career convinced him this was the way to go.

“My wife is a nurse, so that was one of the things I looked at,” he said. “She could have a job anywhere in the country. So, I wanted that same ability with whether we ever decide to move or not.”

Electricity touches every sector of society in every community across America, Schroyer pointed out. There’s nowhere he could go that an electrical trade wouldn’t be useful.

“There’s so many different avenues to take with this career,” he added. “I can do residential, I can do commercial, industrial. I could teach once I get my journeyman’s license.”

One other thing he really likes about the trade is the sense that he is making a real difference, one that people can physically see, with the work he does.

Right now, he’s part of a team that’s helping light up a University of Wyoming stadium.

“I’m born and raised in Laramie, and this place means a lot to me,” he said. “I get to put these lights up that this whole town is going to see for the next 30 years. That’s a really cool feeling.”

Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.