Getting In Was the Easy Part: What Keeps People in Blade Repair

I wrote two posts about getting into blade repair earlier this summer. The first was about building a network and going directly to the people who do the hiring. The second covered specialist recruiters, which professional groups are actually worth joining, and the certifications that open doors. Between them they answer the question that lands in my DMs most weeks.

They also stop precisely where the hard part starts.

Both of those posts are about getting hired. Neither says a word about staying, and staying is the more useful question, because this industry does not really have a recruitment problem. It has a retention problem wearing a recruitment problem’s coat. So this is the bit I left out.

The industry keeps losing people it already trained

The pattern is familiar to anyone who has run a crew. Someone does their GWO Basic Safety Training, gets through IRATA Level 1, works a season or two, and then goes. Often into something adjacent, sometimes out of the sector altogether.

From the employer’s side that is close to the worst possible outcome. They paid for the training, carried the person through the supervised hours when they were slower than the rest of the team, and lost them at roughly the point they stopped being a cost and started being useful. A Level 1 who leaves at eighteen months never repays the investment.

This is not only my impression. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics expects around 1,500 wind technician openings a year in the United States through to 2035, and attributes many of them not to growth but to the need to replace people who transfer to other occupations or leave the workforce entirely.¹ The GWO and GWEC joint workforce outlook, which puts the sector’s requirement at 628,000 people by 2030, lists improving retention alongside training capacity as one of the things that has to be solved for that number to be reachable at all.² Recruitment on its own does not close a gap you are simultaneously leaking through.

What is striking is how rarely the height is the reason. People who are genuinely frightened of exposure work that out during training, not two years in. The reasons people leave are almost always somewhere else.

What the training does not prepare you for

Your rope access course happens in a controlled environment with a known layout, an instructor watching, and the weather kept firmly outside. The job is seventy metres up in November with a weather window closing and a crew waiting on you.

The gap between those two things is not technical. Your technical competence is the entry fee rather than the job.

A scoping review published in Ergonomics last year went looking for the research on human factors in wind work and found remarkably little of it, just thirteen peer-reviewed articles and eight pieces of grey literature covering the whole sector.³ What it did find recurred consistently: fatigue, demanding shift patterns, remote working locations and adverse weather, sorted into factors that sit with the individual, the crew, the organisation and the task itself. The authors’ conclusion was essentially that the industry is running a large, physically demanding workforce on a thin evidence base about what keeps them safe and well.

Put in terms that are more use to you on a Tuesday morning: the skill nobody examines you on is judgement about your own state. Knowing when you are too cold, too tired, or too far into a long shift to make a good call, and then saying so out loud. That is considerably harder than it sounds when a window is closing, the day rate is burning, and nobody else has said anything.

The technicians who last are the ones who can say it early, and who work for people who do not make them regret it.

Most of the job is not repairing

This is the part I would want to know, and the part the recruitment material rarely mentions.

A serious proportion of the work is mobilisation, travel, waiting on weather, standing down, and waiting again. People arrive expecting the repairs and get the waiting. Then they get more waiting.

Managing yourself through that dead time is a real skill and nobody teaches it. The people who stay tend to have something going on in the gaps, whether that is study towards the next level, a trade they keep ticking over at home, or simply a settled routine for a fortnight in a travel lodge in the middle of nowhere. The people who struggle are usually the ones who only planned for the climbing.

Then there is the travel. Weeks away, several countries in a season, living out of a bag. The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts it drily, noting that offshore work in particular “may require being away from home for several days or weeks at a time”.¹ That sentence covers an enormous amount of ground.

Having spoken to a good many blade technicians over the years, my understanding is that this ends more careers in this trade than danger, difficulty and money put together. A relationship that cannot take another season, a young family, or having simply had enough of airports. I should be careful to call that an observation rather than a finding, because the research is thin here too. The one qualitative study I can find of families living the offshore fourteen-days-on, fourteen-days-off rotation concluded that most partners had in fact adapted reasonably well, helped considerably by better communication technology than the industry had a decade ago.⁴

That chimes with what technicians tell me too. It is survivable, and more survivable now than it was. It is just the thing people most underestimate before they start, and the thing they most often name on the way out.

None of that is a reason to avoid the industry. It is a reason to be honest with yourself about it at the two-year mark rather than the six-year mark.

The career is in the logbook

Progression here is not measured in years elapsed. It is measured in logged, supervised hours, which means two technicians who started on the same day can be eighteen months apart purely on how much rope time they were given.

That changes what you should be asking an employer. Pay is the obvious question and not the most important one. The questions that actually shape your next five years are these:

• How many rope hours will I realistically log in a season here?
• Who supervises me, and are they around often enough to sign the logbook?
• What is the split between blade work and everything else?
• Do you support people through Level 2 and Level 3, or do you replace them?

Keep the logbook current, and keep it yourself. It is the one asset in this trade that belongs to you and travels with you when the contract ends. And if nobody in particular is responsible for recording your hours, that usually means nobody does.

What a decent employer looks like from the inside

You can tell a great deal in the first fortnight, and most of it has nothing to do with the interview:

• Kit gets bought and replaced without an argument
• There is a training budget that existed before you asked about it
• A stand-down gets communicated early, and you are told where you stand on pay
• Paperwork does not eat your evening
• The team lead is somebody the crew would follow into a difficult day

That last one is worth more than any of the others. A good team lead is the difference between a crew that raises problems early and a crew that hopes nobody notices.

The bit employers usually get wrong

When retention comes up at the management end, the conversation almost always turns to pay. Pay matters, obviously. It is also not where most people break.

People break on friction. Two hours of reporting at the end of a twelve-hour shift. Being asked to key in data they already wrote down at height. A monthly argument about hours because nobody kept a straight record of what was actually worked, so the technician and the office are each reconstructing the same fortnight from memory.

I am not going to pretend software fixes retention, because it does not. But those particular frictions are systems problems rather than people problems, and they are solvable. Removing them is more or less what Collabaro is for: the report comes out of what the technician already captured at height rather than being written up afterwards, and the hours are recorded as the shift happens rather than reconstructed from memory a month later.

Get that right and you give technicians their evenings back, and you remove the argument that sours a working relationship faster than almost anything else. That is the part of this I actually know something about, and I will leave it there.

If you are the one deciding whether to stay

Two years in, you know whether the travel suits your life. That is the real question, and it is a different question from whether you are any good at the job.

The ones who last are rarely the boldest. They are the organised ones. They keep the logbook current, they say when they are too tired, they find something to do with the waiting, and they work out early how to make weeks away survivable for the people at home.

If that is you, this is a trade that will keep you employed and moving for as long as you want it, in an industry that is going to need more of you every year. And if it is not, working that out at two years rather than six is not a failure. It is just good judgement, which is the thing this job asks for most.

If you are earlier in this than that, start with Part 1 on building a network and Part 2 on recruiters and certifications. And if you are hiring rather than job hunting, our own openings are on the careers page.

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