NA-YGN

[Nuclear Renaissance]

NA-YGN (North American Young Generation in Nuclear; <35 yrs old, <10 years experience) was mentioned in another thread. I thought I'd start a new thread seeking opinions on how effective this organization is as local chapters at your various sites.

My personal opinion of my local chapter is that it is not effective – my belief is that it should exist to serve its members through professional development opportunities and serve the company by input regarding entry-level employee recruitment and retention. What I've seen though is just a bunch of social gatherings with company-paid food and beverages under the guise of "networking", and little advocacy for the membership as a whole by the chapter officers who do indeed have access to Directors, VPs and above.

What are your perceptions of the organization, either as members yourself or as non-members seeing how these "young 'uns" operate?

[Duke Nuker]

Mostly engineers here, I am too old to join.  They are not very visible in the larger scheme of things.  I would think they would be speaking at NRC public meetings and representing the younger generation.  Mostly I think they just eat pizza and go bowling.

[Preciousblue1965]

I have never heard of this group before the previous posts.  Of course I am not in the commerical nuke field.  I would be interested in finding out more about them and where they are located(I live close to Oak Ridge, TN and Y-12 there has to be a chapter somewhere around here).  

[Smooth Operator]

www.na-ygn.org

I think on a whole, the membership is dominated by young engineers, for the simple reason that day staffers tend to have more availability to involve themselves in extra-curricular activities.

[nuketarded]

I'm not sure how you'd measure "effectiveness." 

As far as professional development, our group has meetings with executives to discuss future nuclear plans and also has career counseling/mentoring programs.  We've had sessions on public speaking and workshops for career development (SRO vs PE etc.).  Experts in various fields are also invited to share their knowledge.

The group travels to public meetings for new reactors which is great in the southeast.  The focus here is on informing the public.
 
The group has also been to many of the recruiting events in recent years.  This is a plus when recruiting young professionals.  It is primarily young engineers but we've had good participation from craft as well. 

The group does a monthly social (typically not funded).

In my experience the young engineers tend to have a positive position when it comes to their careers and that tends to lead to greater participation in work-related extracurricular activities.  The sites at some utilities have a hard time generating momentum so they have defaulted to a centralized role typically out of a corporate office where the schedule is more conducive.