You must love ships or boats to have chosen a career of being a marine electrician. Depending on the opportunities that may be presented, you could be working with a large company of people and help complete massive ships or do your job at a less massive scale as work on smaller boats.
Although your role may not be directly involved in building sea vessels from the ground-up, you do play the pivotal task of making sure that such transport is equipped with the right electrical supply to do certain functions involving electricity.
As a marine electrician, your job would typically have you either work at sea or at the dock or port, doing needed troubleshooting and repairs on ships or both across a plethora of many potential problems in their electrical circuitry. Other times, you would be using your wit and deep understanding of electric circuits as you follow on pre-designed schematics which you will be tasked to build from scratch.
See Also: Electrician Levels / Ranks
Truly, the job of a marine electrician is a satisfying one. But it is also so which espouses the downsides that come with the job that might not be openly-known to people. As such, we list down the pros and cons that come with the role of a marine electrician.
Pros of Being a Marine Electrician
• The path towards becoming a marine electrician (journeyman electrician) is well-compensated endeavor
No full-fledged person could call himself a journeyman electrician if he did not go through the difficulty of learning its trade as an apprentice. This ordeal could take some significant amount of time, roughly at least 4 years.
Fortunately, to be an apprentice in order to become a journeyman electrician is a properly-compensated plight. This means that, even as you still learn, you still get paid when you perform a task that befits you as a learning apprentice. It is akin to getting an early working experience, despite you being a student still.
To actually earn while learning as a student is not a privilege which many other fields of study offers. But, rather, to the contrary. Hence, when other students are graduating from either the college or university with debt to account for in the future, an apprentice who finished his needed training leaves the program with lots of money in his pocket.
• The pay is good
The job of a marine electrician is no joke and thus comes with its own set of challenges and difficulties. This is not to mention the needed specialization which only years-long training could provide as an apprentice. For a role that has a significant demand in the maritime transport and even shipbuilding business, a marine electrician is a well-paid job, more so than an average US worker.
According to statistics gathered by Payscale from anonymous participants, an entry-level marine electrician—that is, a marine electrician with fewer than 5 years of experience—earns an average yearly income of $42,000; whereas those of 5 years or so experience under their belt, earn an average annual pay of $46,000. But, of course, the paygrade gets substantially higher the more experience a marine electrician accrues simply by doing his job.
See Also: Electrician Types
• Unique working environment
One of the major appeals why some people chose to become a marine electrician is undeniably because of the different workplace ambience it offers. When not speaking specifically of whether ship or boats, it also talks about the setting where the job takes place—at sea or by the shore. For some people, there is a level of novelty to this kind of environment which makes them pursue on it.
Cons of Being a Marine Electrician
• Slower career growth than other journeyman branches
Despite the relative demand for marine electricians, there is a well-established prospect that growth in this line of work would slow beginning in 2014 until 2024. Not only is the business often catered for the rich few, which means that a small number of people are invested in the trade, it also stresses the possible saturation of other qualified workers in the area.
• Might not be a stable career
Corollary to the idea that growth in the trade of a marine electrician is expected to be slower than other electricians, another dismaying aspect of pursuing on it as a career is that the prospect that certain employment can only be seasonal, thereby not stable.
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• Risky job
The job of a marine electrician may at times invoke the need to work in a setting which is perfectly hazardous to a person. This means being exposed to work areas involving water while at the same time working in an electrical equipment. But this is not to say that the job is “impossible” to do—it is. However, it does raise the risk of the hazard which comes with the job as well.
• Some of your tools will come out of your own pocket
It might seem a trend that companies or unions provide their members all the equipment needed for them to do their job. But not if you are a solo flight marine electrician whose potential employers do not consider providing equipment a responsibility. In such cases, you would be willy-nilly not to come up with them, even if it means doing so out of your own expense.
• The job may be physically-demanding and -taxing
Working on a boat or a ship’s electrical system may seem like a simple job to do. But wait until you are exposed to the level of tasks it requires to keep everything working and in proper order. Not only does the job requires much of your physical strength, it is also taxing on your energy.
If anything, it insinuates the need to keep oneself get used to the labor aspect of the job while at the same time facing its challenges by choosing to remain physically fit.
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• Exposure to certain hazardous materials
Working for something as gargantuan as a ship or something smaller as a boat pits you to a different kind of hazards that may be alien to your peers from another branch of the journeyman role. Primarily, as a marine electrician, this would be an element like chemicals.