Taking A Huge Pay Cut To Become A Lineman

If you're trying to get into a trade right now, you've probably gotten the same advice everyone gets. Be patient. Take what you can get. Get some adjacent experience first, stay close to home, wait for the right opening. It sounds like the responsible thing to do.

Cole Martinsen took that advice for four years. He finished line school in nine months and then spent four more doing everything except line work — telecom, gas, a desk job doing electric design — and every one of those jobs paid him well to stay put. He'll tell you it's the thing he'd take back. When the opening finally came, getting in meant dropping ten dollars an hour and standing next to guys who were miles ahead of him.

He's topped out now. This one is for anybody sitting in front of the same choice he was: the answer to "should I wait until I'm ready" turns out to be expensive, and he can tell you exactly how expensive.

DISCLAIMER: all discussions regarding earnings and earning potential are demonstrative. Individual earnings are dependent on experience, region, employer, as well as market conditions.

WHAT WE GET INTO

Whether taking a safer job to "get experience first" actually gets you in — or just moves the start line.
What to do when the only opening available is a step down in pay, and how fast it comes back.
How long the path really takes, start to finish, from somebody who isn't selling you anything.
What happens to your paycheck every six months once you're inside an apprenticeship.
Where a journeyman tops out — the actual number, not a range someone rounded off.
Whether you can count on the overtime, and why he doesn't count on his.
The trap your first big paycheck sets for you, and what it looks like from the inside.
What to do when you don't know something on a job site and everybody's watching.
Who this trade isn't for. He's specific, and it comes down to a tape measure.

ABOUT COLE MARTINSEN

Cole is a journeyman distribution lineman in the Twin Cities metro who came up the long way and is the first to say so.

He also built US Trade Route, a free site that answers the question he kept getting from friends' little brothers and cousins: how do I actually get into this? It's how-to guides and pay information by trade and by state — aimed squarely at the gap nobody filled for him when he was seventeen.