Inside the New Playbook for Utility Workforce Readiness

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
As a professional involved in electricity delivery, the T&D World Podcast and tdworld.com is your definitive source for breaking news, industry updates and more. We've got you covered from transmission to distribution and everything that affects the power grid. And now on to today's episode.

**Nikki Chandler** (0:17)
Hello everyone, and welcome to the T&D World Live Podcast. I'm your host, Nikki Chandler. And today we're diving into one of the most urgent conversations happening across the utility industry right now, and that's workforce readiness. Utilities are really facing a perfect storm of challenges. We have experienced workers retiring, we have new technologies entering the field faster than ever, and growing pressure to maintain reliability while modernizing the grid. So the big question becomes, how do utilities train and prepare the next generation of workers quickly, consistently, and effectively? So that's exactly what we'll be discussing today ahead of a session coming up this fall at T&D World Live in September. And that's gonna be in Orlando.
And the session is called Scaling Workforce Readiness Through Multimodal Training. So the session itself will feature Florida Power and Light. They will also have today's guests for our podcast who are helping really shape those conversations around human performance, workforce development and immersive training technologies. And I'm talking immersive, so this is gonna be a really interesting conversation. So joining me today are Dr. James Merlo, CEO of the North American Generator Forum, and Scott Summers from Index AR Solutions. Welcome, guys.
Thank you.
Yeah. Yeah. So thank you so much. To start out, kind of before we get into some of my questions and our discussion, I'd like for you guys to both give a little bit of background about yourselves and how you came to be in your current roles. It really has a lot to do with where we're at right now. So I'm gonna go ahead and start with you, James.

**James Merlo** (2:10)
Well, thank you, Nikki. So glad to be here today.
I'm Dr. James Merlo, as you said, and I always like to say I'm a doctor without a stethoscope. So it's a no, I have my Ph.D. in Human Factors Engineering. Engineering Psychology is another term for it. And I started out, I got that degree actually from West Point. West Point has one of the only undergraduate universities, only a handful that actually offer engineering psychology and study of humans and machines, which is really applicable for today. Even things like human-computer interaction, right? The whole idea of how do we get the human to thrive inside of its organization. So did that for about 26 years in the US. Army. I was an infantry officer, got a chance to jump out of airplanes and had a great, great time serving our country. I left that and went to the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which is the watchdog or the regulator for the bulk electric system. And certainly got to use my engineering there, but really got to use my psychology. We studied different events that occurred across the grid.
And we had some really super engineers that could figure out electrically what was happening. And I got to contribute to talk about the organizational challenges that were related to those averages. When I left NERC, I went to work for Knowledgevine, which is a human performance provider. I got a chance to work specifically on organization and individual human performance across North America and working with different utilities, mostly in the electrical space. And when I left there, I went to become a CEO of where I'm at now, the North American Generator Forum, where we represent well over half of the North American capacity for generation. And so I'm very excited to talk to you today about our workforce.

**Nikki Chandler** (3:53)
Yeah, thank you so much. And James, I know that you've contributed to T&D World before, along with Scott.
James, when you were part of NERC, I remember we had you do a couple of articles for us. So we appreciate both of you guys. So Scott, yeah, let us know about your background.

**Scott Summers** (4:10)
Yeah, and Nikki, thank you very much for having us. We're really excited to be here. My background is I was actually an energy banker for the better part of 25 years with UBS, Mellon Financial and Catter Fitzgerald. Most of what I did was typical investment banking, debt capital markets, equity capital markets, mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, structured finance, project finance, hedging, rates, commodities, the typical things you would see.
After about 25 years of that, a former client went over to be CEO at a small phone company and said, I think you'd really enjoy this. So I went over there for about six years. It was there that I really had a touch to the trades because in my banking career, I was mostly in the ivory tower for all intents and purposes. But learning how skilled the trade groups are at what they do was humbling, and really enjoyed that an awful lot.