At Your Best as an Electrician

Your Playbook for Building a Great Career and Launching a Thriving Small Business as an Electrician

Juan Carosso

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781510744011
• Topic: Crescita personale
• Subtopic: Carriera

The only series of step-by-step guides to succeeding in the skilled trades and achieving the American dream. At Your Best as an Electrician is your playbook for learning if a career as an electrician is right for you, progressing from pre-apprentice to journeyman to master electrician, and launching your own small business. Learn:

• What does a career as an electrician look like?
• Why should you consider becoming an electrician?
• How do you become a successful craftsman as an electrician?
• How much can you make as an electrician?
• What are your career options once you become an electrician?
• How long does it take to be successful at each stage in a electrician's career?
• How and where do you find work as an electrician?
• What does it take to strike out on your own?
• What does it take to launch and build a successful small business? At Your Best is the only step-by-step handbook to finding if a career in the trades is right for you, educating yourself and earning the proper certifications, establishing yourself as an excellent apprentice and journeyman in the industry, and moving on to start your own small business in the trades. At each step of the way, your At Your Best playbookprovides the information, recommendations, outside resources, and concrete actions needed for taking the next successful step in You, Inc. Whether you are beginning your first career, changing careers, or ready to move up and start your own business as a carpenter, plumber, HVAC/R tech, or other tradesman, this is the book that will tell you how. There currently over 6.5 million unfilled jobs in the skilled trades in the US. Despite being well-paying and secure, these jobs remain open because enough qualified candidates with the skills, attitude, and experience required do not exist. Moreover, plenty of opportunity exists for established tradespeople to start their own business, but they have no guidance. The At Your Best Playbooks series changes that.

PART 1:

At Your Best Fundamentals: The Rules of the Game

As you read this AYB Playbook, you will want to keep a number of foundational concepts in mind to provide context for what we will be discussing. Part 1 specifically lays out the AYB Fundamentals, so you can refer to them as you progress through this AYB Playbook.

This section will describe:

   How this AYB Playbook and the www.AtYourBest.com website together are designed to provide you the action plan and tools to be successful at each stage in your career and in your small business

•   The sources and methods used to create the content you will find in this AYB Playbook

   Who the AYB Playbook series was created to help and how they can use AYB Playbooks to build a successful career and launch a thriving small business

   Some basic truths about taking on an At Your Best mindset

•   It all begins with You, Inc.

•   3P+A = People, Performance, Professionalism and Attitude

CHAPTER 1

AYB Playbooks & www.AtYourBest.com

YOU ARE AT YOUR BEST
when you have the right tools for the job.

AYB PLAYBOOKS & WWW.ATYOURBEST.COM

AYB Playbooks and the At Your Best website are designed to work together to give you access to the broadest set of resources you may need as you build your career and business. The AYB Playbooks are kept short and concise to make them easy to read and keep close by for easy, quick reference. The www.AtYourBest.com site is designed to include all the additional resources and tools to help you become successful.

AYB Playbooks are intended to present you with a clear, direct path to reach key stages in a career in a specific Skilled Trade. The path is laid out as a set of milestones and checklists that you can use to hold yourself accountable, like a game plan. However, AYB Playbooks are specifically designed to be concise versus all-encompassing. You will be given easy-to-use starting points so that you can move to the next to-do or milestone.

Bottom line: This AYB Playbook is intended to provide you a pathway to follow, with the important waypoints along the way, to a successful career in the Skilled Trades. This AYB Playbook will present:

What to consider when thinking about starting your career in the Skilled Trades

How and where to get the training you need to start your career

What steps you need to take to build a successful career

How to capitalize on the skills and experience you build during your career to launch a successful small business

Which critical success factors you need to focus on to maximize your potential for success as a small business in the Skilled Trades

The various career and business planning tools and worksheets described in this AYB Playbook are available on our website in the AYB Quick Tools section. The inventory of AYB Quick Tools will grow well beyond those described in the AYB Playbook, as readers and website visitors request additional tools. So, please visit our website regularly. If you cannot find what you need or would like, let us know and we will try to create it and make it available for everyone.

“A look beyond the horizon” is how one of the AYB Subject Matter Experts described what he wished that he could have had while he was building his career and his very successful general contracting business. That is what I hope to offer you with the AYB Playbooks and our www.AtYourBest.com website—to give you a view of what you will likely need or encounter if you pursue a particular course of action, so you can a make better decision before you get there.

The content in AYB Playbooks is supplemented with additional content and resources and access to the AYB community of other readers and subject matter experts via the AYB website. The objective is that as more readers visit our website and provide their comments, questions and interests, the site will continually improve to serve our readers.

“Subject Matter Expert?”—Not really. I am just a guy who loved what I did: building homes to the best of my ability with a great team of craftsmen who stuck with me because I stuck with them. Our customers kept coming back because we were always fair and honest with the good and the ugly.

—JEFF M., RETIRED CONTRACTOR, ST. LOUIS

AT YOUR BEST WITH SUBJECT MATTER EXPERTS

The content in AYB Playbooks will provide you insights from an array of real-world, Subject Matter Experts (SME). Each SME was selected because of their success in their respective expertise.

SMEs were consulted at each stage of developing the At Your Best Playbook series. Collectively, their role, as presented through their quotes and words of wisdom, is to provide you a “look beyond the horizon.” As they say, “to be forewarned is to be forearmed.” The objective of AYB Playbooks is to help to minimize the unknowns ahead as you consider a career in the skilled trades.

To a person, SMEs stress that there is no shortcut or work-around for the time, good attitude, hard work and perseverance needed to acquire the education, skills and experience to become successful as a Craftsman in the skilled trades. Every SME is just as adamant that if you are prepared to put in the time and do the hard work to become a true Craftsman, you will find yourself with little competition and much success in your choice of jobs in your chosen Skilled Trade.

To review a few of the SME interviews conducted for developing the AYB Playb...