Transcript
Oscar Burgess My name is Oscar Burgess and I am a solar installer. As an intern, my main tasks are to build solar arrays either on a roof or on the ground, and that tends to be the majority of my job.
Michael Schultz Yeah, it's been really enjoyable having Oscar on, and there is again, when you bring on students or youth, there is always a risk there because they just don't have the experience. But then the benefit when they get on board is you just have this person that's so excited to get to work and learn new things every day.
Oscar Burgess First day for me, I'd usually show up to the shop around 8:00 and then we would get a file seeing where we would go, what type of job we were doing, and then we would load up our trailer accordingly, with all the materials we'd need, we'd head off to the site, we would inspect the site for any hazards, have a little tailgate safety meeting, and if it would be on a roof, which is normally what we do in the summer, we would go up there, mark out everything we need to do, and then start installing the solar racking and then the modules.
Mariah Buyers My name is Mariah Buyers and I'm a sales and design rep at Solvest.
Michael Schultz Mariah’s is a real success story in terms of, in terms of programs like this.
Mariah Buyers This is Mariah calling from Solvest. How are you today? That's great. Originally was brought on as a operations assistant, project management assistant. And unfortunately, due to covid, we ended up losing quite a few of our large projects and they got delayed. So that position got moved into doing assessments and eventually sales and design. That consists of, for assessments, going from client to clients’ homes, performing assessments that include measurements, taking photos, communicating with the client and kind of gathering everything we need to do an actual design. I've definitely learnt more in the last year about solar and renewable energies than I ever thought I did, especially coming right out of university and going into a position like this, I couldn't ask for anything more. And then on top of that, the work environment is amazing. It's a really young company, everyone's friends, and it just makes it that much more enjoyable.
Michael Schultz Solvest is an exceptionally green forward company and young company. So the green jobs program was a perfect fit for us and improved our ability to bring on very junior staff and have them trained up.