The job outlook for electricians in the Tulsa area is shockingly good, an industry expert told a Tulsa Regional Chamber audience Thursday.  

Boosted by a national data center boom, a demand for more than six gigawatts of electricity is expected over the next decade around the city, doubling the size of the electric utility grid in the area, said Doug Mackenzie, senior vice president of power and energy at global real estate services company JLL. 

“There are going to be these massive investments in very sophisticated facilities,” he said.  

The construction of data centers in certain parts of the United States, coupled by a shortage of laborers, has led to annual compensation soaring as high as $400,000 for electricians and up to $175,000 for heating and air conditioning contractors, Mackenzie said.  

“We all want to be electricians now, right?” said Rue Ramsey, the Chamber’s vice president of workforce and talent strategies, earning chuckles from the crowd at the Chamber’s State of Workforce and Talent.  

Ramsey moderated a panel discussion that included Mackenzie and JLL Executive Managing Director Matt Jackson on Thursday. Before a gathering of close to 420 people at the DoubleTree by Hilton Hotel Tulsa-Warren Place, the event also featured a keynote address by Kyla Guyette, CEO of the newly formed Oklahoma Workforce Commission.  

Guyette spoke for 20 minutes before taking roughly 10 minutes of questions from audience.  

She talked about a workforce strategy in the state, which includes a CareerLaunch Revolving Fund for skill identification in elementary school, middle school career exploration and paid work experience in high school.   

Guyette also told the audience she would like to help increase the state’s net migration from 14,000 to 40,000 people and raise Oklahoma’s labor force participation rate from 63% to 65%, a percentage the state hasn’t’ reached since 1983.  

One way to do that is to improve childcare access for workers, Oklahoma Rep. and childcare advocate Suzanne Schreiber said during the audience participation portion of the program.  

”You cannot separate the way that you care for your children with your responsibilities at work” Guyette said. “We are looking (at forming) a subcommittee of the Workforce Commission dedicated to childcare for workforce needs.  

“…It would great if we lived in a world with the same responsibilities for men and women. But that’s just not true. Women are the ones who have to give up the job in most cases, and as COVID as taught us, those are the folks who left their jobs.”   The panel discussion examined a workforce that soon will be flooded with AI, machine learning and robotics, Jackson said.  

“We need to focus on the more complicated jobs that are going to require a significant level of upskilling of the workforce,” he said.  

As the digital economy expands and advanced manufacturing continues to surge, engineers will be in demand, Jackson said.  

“We’re seeing a gargantuan wave of new projects coming back,” he said. “In the old days, a big project was a couple of hundred jobs, 10 megawatts of power, 50 acres of land and a couple of hundred thousand square feet of building.   

“Big projects now are multibillion dollar investments, 100-plus to 400 megawatts of power, 7,000 to 15,000 jobs. You’ve just seen this unbelievable seismic shift in what has come back to the U.S.”  

Cities that find ways to accommodate this kind of economic development expansion will be the most successful, Jackson said.  

“If you have a community that doesn’t have the digital infrastructure to support the manufacturing, that will potentially become a hindrance to growing and evolving  in that space,” he said. “So, we think that is not wise to view data center activity separate from manufacturing, aerospace, robotics. Going forward, we think the ecosystem is going to start to blend, and one will feed off the other.”