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Jim O’Neill didn’t plan on a teaching career when he retired from Progress Energy in Florida in 2005. The youngest of 1,700 members of St. Petersburg Local 682 to qualify for an early retirement, O’Neill, an equipment operator, moved back to his native Ohio, planning to play golf and pick up some work as needed to make ends meet.

A few years back, while attending a niece’s wedding, O’Neill struck up a conversation with a teacher at the area’s technical high school who asked if he had ever considered passing on his career skills to students looking for good jobs in the utility industry. A job at Mid-East Career and Technology Center in Zanesville sounded rewarding.

O’Neill took some classes at Ohio State, acquired a teaching license and set his sights on becoming not just a teacher—but a mentor—helping to shape the direction of students who arrive at Mid-East from 14 regular high schools in 10 mostly-rural counties of the Appalachian region.

This year, O’Neill won an award as Outstanding New Career and Technical Education Teacher covering a 15-state region. The award from the Association of Career and Technical Educators is welcomed, says O’Neill. But his greatest satisfaction comes when students come back for a visit after landing their first job. Says O’Neill:

When you consider the area a lot of these students come from, it’s exciting when they come back and tell me how much money they are making,

Travis Harless, 22, entered the power line program at Mid-East in his junior year. A line mechanic at American Electric Power and a member of Columbus Local 1466, Harless, the son of a member of the laborer’s union, says:

Jim’s a real good instructor. Learning from Jim is just like working with a co-worker on a good job.

“When I started out in the field,” says O’Neill, “I didn’t know a bolt from a piece of rope. I teach students [who end up at AEP and a few other utilities and cable firms] how to climb poles, work with transformers and conduct pole-top rescues.”

Recently, O’Neill helped to launch an adult program at the high school to prepare older students for careers in the utility industry. Working with AEP, he has secured donations of bucket trucks and other equipment upon which students—in the day and night schools—practice to gain their commercial driver’s licenses and become OSHA-certified.

“I’ve doubled my budget since I’ve been here,” says O’Neill, who regularly receives positive reports from employers about his students’ progress.

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