How We’re Helping Electricians Overcome the Skilled Labor Shortage

Lately, I’ve been hearing from a lot of my electrician clients that finding higher-skilled and certified electricians is incredibly tough. Getting apprentices isn’t the problem — it’s those journeyman-licensed candidates that are hard to come by.

Here’s what we’re doing right now that’s working well for the companies we’re working with. If you’re facing similar challenges, I hope this can help.

1. Keeping Employees at All Costs

The last thing you want is to lose your current licensed electricians when hiring replacements is this difficult. That’s why we’re doing everything we can to help our clients keep their teams intact. So far, we’ve been able to help every single one of them retain all their journeyman employees, even when competitors try to poach them.

The biggest thing that’s working? Performance-based bonuses.

Instead of just increasing salaries across the board, we’re paying out significant bonuses tied directly to performance. By structuring these as commissions, employees get to keep more of that bonus without it getting eaten up by taxes, and companies aren’t stuck spending money they don’t have. It’s a win-win — electricians earn more, and companies only pay when the results are there.

2. Boosting Efficiency with the Team You Have

Since hiring is so tough, we’re focusing on helping our clients get more done with their existing journeyman electricians. And no, this isn’t about overworking people. It’s about giving them more leverage so their time is spent on the highest-value work.

Here’s how we’re doing it:

• Automating the Repetitive Stuff: Anything we can automate, we are. Whether it’s streamlining scheduling, invoicing, or reporting, removing manual tasks has freed up hours every week.
• Fixing Job and Parts Ordering Systems: A lot of our clients had inefficient ordering systems that led to wasted time and job delays. We’ve cleaned that up to ensure materials arrive on time, so jobs stay on track.
• Managerial Roles for Journeyman Electricians: We’re putting journeyman electricians in more leadership roles. They’re overseeing multiple jobs instead of being on-site for every little task. This has multiplied their impact, even tripling capacity in some cases. To minimize mistakes, we’ve focused on tightening up processes and applying automation where it makes sense.

Need Help Managing the Shortage? Let’s Talk

If any of this resonates with you, I’d be happy to dive deeper into how these strategies might work for your business. It’s not a fun situation to be in, but there are definitely ways to make it more manageable.

Let’s figure it out together. I’m always here to help!