ComEd’s Power Up Academy is Clearing the Path to Technical Careers
Laticia Holbert is ComEd Senior Manager of Workforce Development.
When we talk about the future of the electric grid, the conversation goes straight to technology, infrastructure, distributed resources or advanced systems. All of it matters. But the more time I spend in this work, the more convinced I am that the most consequential thing we can do is focus on the people who will operate that grid. More specifically: making sure we’re looking in the right places to find them.
I came to ComEd’s Workforce Development team after years on the community side. I was part of a community-based organization, now in its 14th year, which partnered with ComEd’s Construct Infrastructure Academy. It marked the first time I saw what was possible when a utility, its partners, and a community got serious about building a pipeline — it felt like magic. It still does.
Seeing the Gap
A few years ago, ComEd commissioned a job study that put a number to what many of us already suspected. Approximately 150,000 clean energy jobs are coming to Illinois by 2050. The question was how to get people from the communities that we serve ready for those jobs. We knew we had to move deliberately.
The Construct program gives participants a broad picture of energy and construction-related roles across ComEd and our corporate partners. Craft Academy, launched more recently, focuses on construction and overhead helper positions and includes the physical assessments those roles require.