Career Path > Salary Questions
Maintenance Supervisor
S3GLMS:
I took a position as a first line maintenance supervisor at TVA when I left the Navy. What I read from most of the previous threads covers almost all of the good and bad for the job. The heart of the matter is that you will be making a lot of important decisions right away about how to keep the plant online, Tech specs and LCO's. You will also need to learn how to work with your team and earn their respect. As a supervisior in a commercial plant a lot of the trades are die hard union and they frown upon salary staff (apparently a lot of pevious bad history). The only way to get them to really work with you is to prove you respect their work and show knowledge and flexibility in getting them through their schedules. This means a lot of sacrifice for the supervisor to earn points with the crew.
This being said if you really want day shift work and are interested in reactive schedules and a lot of unpaid overtime when the equipment is not performing than you should be able to handle it. You will only make about 70% of what the SRO's and Shift managers make so understand your not going to be at the top of the heap for bonuses either. You will have the opportunity to do other salary jobs at some point in your career which may interest you and that is what I saw for most of my time in Maintenance. The only long serving frontline supervisors were former technicians trying to complete their last years of service at a higher base pay rate for a better retirement package. One thing that you can not control will be the nature of the union issues in the plant and the number of senior salary manager changes that will occur and they all can make your life difficult.
If you do well at the job people will treat you with respect and will try to help you get your job done, especially in the control room when you need to get hold orders hung and work packages reviewed. It definitely is not an 8-4 punch the clock type of job.
DSO:
How was the 2nd Line Supervisor's job in comparison--same reactiveness etc??
S3GLMS:
I was the maintenance shop coordinator/manager ( second Line supervisor) my last year in maintenance. The major difference in the job is the amount of time spent preparing work schedules for daily work as well as the outage scope planning. You attend the 13 week schedule planning meetings and develop the work scope for your area of maintenance. You would get to fill in for the maintenance manger when they are on vacation and perform senior management roles. You are held responsible for the overall daily and monthly work completion performance and budget. You would spend a lot more time on personnel issues such as the staff evaluations and the union grievances.
As a salary maintenance person with some experience I was also a member of the Site emergency team in the TSC for Instrumentation issues. This was a 1 week on and 3 week off assignment. No alchohol allowed during that week, and must be able to report to site within 45 minutes at all times of the week. With other staff members taking vacations or taking other positions in the company would sometimes for a month in a row lock you into an emergency response position and you could not do anything but put up with it because there was no one else qualified to fill the slot.
One of the other salary shop managers was offered SRO certification training and if I had stayed I would have eventually been offered the same training. So over all, if you can work through the first line experience and prove yourself then you may find the job a really good career path to something you never even thought was possible. Just be prepared to make the sacrifices that the management asks you to perform and you will become valuable to their success, and they will recognize you. As a maintnence person in a commercial plant I felt it was a third rate status. Everyone treated me like a technician not as an engineer or a valued leader, just a task master for the plant. It takes a lot of time and hard work to change those impressions in a commercial plant. Overall, it is a good job and it is a tough job as far as stress level is concerned, it is just not for everyone. If you like a challenge then you are on the right track, especially in a dual unit plant with refuel outages every 9 months. I hope this gives you more insight.
rwendell:
I've been trying to find what to expect as a maintenance supervisor, so if I get a job offer, I will know what to work toward. I'm trying to get on at Brown's Ferry, and can't find the salary for similar positions anywhere.
Also, if there is anyone who is in this position, can I get some info about the job to help me make a decision if I even want it?
Fermi2:
There's actually a thread about Maintenance Supervisors that already answers your question. Given you want to be a supervisor I bet it'd be a great research project to find the thread similar to projects you'd be expected to do at BFN.
Mike
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