This is a long post, sorry, but do not hpost normally, but felt I needed to weigh in
A lot of discussion here I have heard before. Seems nothing changes in this industry from that stand point.
I have seen this from many sides of the fence; as a contractor, as a Site Coordinator, as a house HP, as a house supervisor.
RDTroja has it right.
Let me jump in with both feet.
Training of new people: There have been a number of attempts at this. The best was actually the IRM School. Hate to say anything good with IRM in it but, well, anyway, moving on. Seems everyone feels the utilities must solve this problem. They can be part of the solution, but they are not the solution. Company’s that provide training to personnel for job skills provide it for their permanent employee, not for temporary help that will work elsewhere. The utilities are in business to make money, not paying you. You need to remember that.
Can they have people working as juniors? You bet. And they do. Just what they are allowed to do depends on the history of the plant. If they have been burned in the past due to action of a junior, I bet the scope of allowed activities is strictly limited. This goes in cycles. Time heals all till next time.
Can technicians get training themselves? You bet. I have seen many people complain about the quality of the field tech. This has always been the situation. There are technicians and than there are Technicians. The individuals that have coasted along and learned what they need to do to be HP’s are exactly that. They learned what they have seen, right or wrong and believe it is the gospel. I am sure you have seen the ones I mean and they can not be made to realize they do not know anything.
Than, there are Technicians that have taken online courses, college classes, studied various training material and sought to improve their knowledge and understanding of the field or have been in a training program from somewhere that provided the technical background. They work to apply this in the job they do.
People who are sometime not much more than trained monkeys (monkey see monkey do) believe they are under paid. Some people in the field are definitely underpaid. How do you fix the disparity? I have no idea. It has been debated for as long as I have been involved with nuclear power. No one answer works for everyone.
If you want to be paid for being technicians, than be technicians (and there are a lot of theses out there). The road warrior has always been paid an hourly rate lower than house rate. House tech base pay here is about 59K, (we are in the south). Contractors get about 20 to 23 an hour here, per-diem of about 100 or more. Do the math; seniors are not paid much less than the house personnel.
Eric is right, utilities do not work together to set rates. We look at the industry market and seek to get as low as we can for our contracts, period! We are a business. If we can not get fully staffed for the outage, than we operate with what we get. Then management looks at last outage and says, well, you got by with this many people last outage, so that is all you can hire this outage.
I for one would like to see more training for juniors and continuing training for seniors. At the site I am currently at, senior contract personnel do attend the same training plant personnel attend if they are long term contractors (> 6 months at site). This has not happened since I started working her till now.
If you do not know this yet, let me be the first, the utilities will not be the source of this training of new technicians. You can keep pushing, but it won’t happen that way. Sorry, just a reality. Maybe an industry supported school tied to INPO. I think you would have better luck with that idea.
A little long and hopefully, I have not offended anyone but this is the facts as I have observed them with 30 plus years in the industry. Have a nice day