I sat down with Josh Rogers. I first met him when he was on the workforce side at American Clean Power. He consults on his own now. He was a Navy nuclear mechanic about 2 months from getting out when Intel froze hiring and his job offer went with it. So he interviewed at a solar company in Phoenix, and halfway through, the director asked if he could help build their training instead. Josh had never worked on solar.
Josh’s argument is that crews do better work when they know why they’re doing it. He’s watched companies roll out new software and point to the dashboard as proof the field loves it. The crews tell him they hate it.
Take a JSA program (the job safety analysis a crew fills out before a task). The software logs every one, but almost all of the challenge is the people doing it well, every time. As Josh puts it, “this is really the electrical grid, and it requires people to maintain it.”
Josh ran main engines and turbine generators on an aircraft carrier, then read job descriptions and decided he wasn’t qualified for some of them. If you’re doing the same thing, he has a different way to read them.
Chapters
00:00 – Introduction
01:21 – Going Independent as a Consultant
05:31 – Corporate vs. the Field: People Over Software
11:08 – Why Field Teams Stay or Leave
15:24 – Joining the Navy and Nuke School
20:46 – Getting Out and Landing in Solar
25:17 – Why Veterans Fit Field Roles
28:12 – GI Bill Benefits for Guard and Reserve
31:08 – Reaching Veterans Already in the Field
36:07 – Rapid Fire
42:37 – How Veterans Can Get Into the Field
