To celebrate Veterans Day this upcoming Friday, November 11th, the Energy Central Community Team will be shining a light on the many outstanding utility professionals in our network who also spent time in the military. This week, we'll be featuring interviews with these veterans sharing how they found their way into the industry. We will also highlight their unique perspectives of the industry and how they are influencing the utility space.
All the interviews will be collected at this special Veterans Day 2022 topic tag.
To all the veterans in the Energy Central Community, we want to say thank you for your service and we wish you a Happy Veterans Day.
Utility consultant Joe Spencer comes from a military family.
One of his sons is in the United States Naval Academy and another one is medically separated from it. Two of his nephews are also at the Naval Academy. His father was an enlisted Sailor during the Korean War. “I guess you could say that we have become a naval academy family,” laughs the 52-year-old Navy Veteran.
Spencer, who worked in Surface Warfare and Naval Aviation in the US Navy for seven years, says his time in the military has shaped his outlook in life. He continues to use the skills he learned and the traits he developed there in his professional and personal life.
A Consultant’s Career
Spencer’s initiation into military life began with a visit to the Naval Academy when he was in high school. “It kind of bit me there,” he says. He wanted to become an astronaut. His father told him the surest way to do that was to pursue naval aviation.
So, he joined the Navy in 1992. He had to select service warfare before earning a lateral transfer into aviation. However, a bout of cancer and family responsibilities (he was married and expecting his third child) cut short his career in the Navy. “The idea of being a naval aviator serving around the globe became much more difficult,” he says. He left the military in 1999, after seven years of service.
Spencer’s post naval career has been in sales and consultancy. He has sold software services as a sales rep in the telecom industry. He currently works as Vice President of Strategic Accounts with Osmose, an Atlanta-based company that manages and extends of utility assets, such as utility poles.
“Most of our customers [who are utility companies] don’t have unlimited time and resources to manage their assets,” he explains. “We help them with that.” His responsibilities include managing a team of sales executives as a player and coach and handling large, complex accounts at utilities.
According to Spencer, the telecom and utility industries have different motivations and styles of working. While the former is focused on generating profit, the latter’s heavily regulated operations mean that its primary aim is responsibly deploy capital. The telecom industry moves faster than utilities, which can crawl at times, says Spencer. “Osmose must match the pace of our customers,” he says.
A Career Aligned to Utilities
The utility industry may crawl but it is uniquely aligned to a veteran’s experience, says Spencer. Certain positions in the industry are an excellent fit for a veteran because they require the same mindset and traits that the military drills into its recruits.
Being goal-driven and self-motivated and possessing leadership qualities are some qualities of a Veteran, Spencer says, that translate well into a utility lineman’s job on the field. “If you are successful [in the military] that means you have adopted some of those traits and unique attributes,” he says.
Spencer uses learnings from his military experience in his current job, as well. Specifically, he points to the military’s orientation towards adapting to different environments and circumstances. This approach ensures that, while you get trained in different skills, you also rotate frequently under different commands. For example, Spencer worked five jobs in three years on a ship while he was in the Navy.
Such seminal experiences at a young age helped strengthen his coping skills while traversing industries. He had a lot to learn. “When I joined Osmose, I didn’t understand how utilities make money,” he says. The learning curve was steep.
But he drew on his past military experience to come up to speed. Now his team uses a combination of reading (The Grid by Gretchen Bakke is required reading) and applying the KISS principle [Keep It Simple Stupid, for the uninitiated] to simplify the complex argot of utility regulation and concepts.
Constant adjustment and learning has become a feature of his personal life as well. “Life is very much like that: continual adaptation,” says the father of eleven kids.
Advice for Military Veterans
Spencer’s transition from military to civilian life was hardly smooth. Further education was not a viable option, having to fund any transition education out of pocket since he left the Navy before the 9/11 GI Bill was established. His skill sets, while substantial on the leadership front, could not be transferred to a specific job in the real world. “The Navy teaches you how to write a resume but corporate America is a different language,” says Spencer. “A focus on profit and loss is different from a focus on preparing to fight wars.”
His circuitous corporate route through sales and consultancy eventually led to an MBA from a highly ranked program at the University of Virginia. Even though he cuts a monthly check for the loan he took out to pursue the program, Spencer says it was a good investment.
To that end, Spencer says a degree helps accelerate prospects after military careers. “If I had to give advice to myself when I departed the military, I would have done my MBA [immediately afterwards] or considered a major retrenching, such as law school or med school,” he says.
That retrenching is an easier for veterans now with the Post-9/11 GI Bill that provides educational assistance to veterans interested in pursuing further education. A college or postgraduate degree will make veterans capable of pursuing available careers in a rapidly transforming utility industry. “There are lots of challenges and lots of change,” says Spencer.
Spencer says the industry’s aging infrastructure in transmission and distribution will have to coexist with new investments in green generation technologies until we find a way to deliver power wirelessly. That transition period is a greenfield of employment opportunities for veterans.
While new equipment will require new skillsets, managing aging infrastructure – as Osmose does – will remain an important part of the industry. “Old infrastructure needs a lot of money, time, and people,” explains Spencer.
A post-military career related to the utility industry is also rewarding. “If you are willing to work hard, if you are capable, if you are honest, there are a lot of ways you can provide your services [to the industry] to garner a sufficient income,” says Spencer.