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Old 12-18-2012, 11:43 PM   #3
Lomac
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I have a pair of friends, conveniently they're also brothers, who are both an industrial electrician and a millwright. I don't have a lot of knowledge about each field, but I'll share what I do know.

Industrial Electrician: Depending on who you work for, you may be used as a catch-all person (doing everything from grunt work of hauling equipment to and from different sites) or you may end up being just a specialized unit (doing, say, only mounting T5HO units 40' in the air). My buddy does pretty much everything in the company, so one day he'll be setting up a laser trip system in a logging mill and the next he'll be crawling over a giant smelting vat in order to run a bunch of 0 gauge wiring for a new generator. There's a lot of heavy lifting involved, and you'd better not be afraid of heights.

Millwright: You're basically a jack-of-all-trades. You need to know everything from basic electrical to welding to having some sort of ability to come up with new ideas on the spot in order to fix something. Millwrights tend to be the general purpose repairman on most industrial sites, so your daily work load will likely vary greatly.

The plus side is that both trades are Red Seal recognized, so should you plan to travel and work at the same time, you shouldn't have too hard of a time finding a job. Personally I think if you're looking to eventually work for yourself, becoming an electrician is probably the better bet... however, if you become a millwright, your knowledge base will much that much wider and you should be more easily employable should you decide to focus on one specific trade.
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