I recently conducted a survey of about 30 workers with less than four years of experience in our industry. I asked them two very simple questions:
I can't take credit for the first question. Industry trainer and fellow The Driller writer Brock Yordy likes to ask all of the workers he meets that same question. He recommends employers ask often during an employee’s first year of employment, then periodically after. For this exercise, I thought it would be interesting to ask the same question from the outside — not working for the companies that employ these young drilling professionals — and follow up with the second, clarifying question. I almost always got the same answer to that second one: working too closely to overhead power lines.