u/Rumble1205

I run a free job board that scrapes Power Engineering postings across Canada daily. Today's batch: 30 new listings, 19 still open after the dead-link check runs.

Notable one: three separate 3rd Class Power Engineer postings in Winnipeg hospitals alone today (Misericordia, WRHA, Shared Health) — if you're 3rd Class and open to relocating, that's worth a look.

Rest of the spread is BC/ON/AB/SK/NS/YT, mostly 3rd and 4th Class. Link if useful: fullsteamahead.ca/jobs.html

Power engineering covers everything from cogen to pulp mills to refineries to municipal utilities. The experience and culture across those environments varies more than the certification system suggests.

I'm curious: what's your current setup, and if you could pick the plant type, size, shift structure, and ownership - would you stay where you are or make a change?

What's the tradeoff you've made that you're most aware of?

Curious what people are seeing out there: how much of a pay difference does moving from 4th to 3rd to 2nd class create, and does it depend more on the certificate or on the plant/province/union?

I know operators with 4th class in heavy unionized plants making more than non-union 2nd class holders in smaller facilities. The ticket matters, but it doesn't seem like the only variable.

What's your experience been and is there a level where the jump in pay actually justified the time investment in a way you could feel?

The people who've been there 25 years carry operational memory that doesn't exist in any log or manual - the quirks of specific equipment, the failure modes that only showed up twice in the last decade, the reasons certain procedures are written the way they are.

I've seen plants handle this well (formal overlap periods, documented run histories, serious mentoring programs) and plants where it just walked out the door.

What's your experience - and do you think the trade does this well or poorly?