Public utilities are companies, corporations or other establishments that provide public services such as water, telecommunications, gas, electricity, etc. Usually, public utilities are specially regulated by the government and as such, they are capable of employing lots of individuals for the purpose of providing state-wide or nationwide services.

With public utilities considered beneficial in various ways, it’s unsurprising that the public sector is the largest employer of labor. Aside from offering lots of jobs to members of the public, public utilities often reward their employees with a host of beneficial packages, some of which employees in the private sector barely get.

If you’ve ever dreamt of spending your professional life in the public sector, it might interest you to work in one of the public utilities out there. While you’d want to know the benefits associated with this, it should also interest you to find out the high-paying jobs in the public utilities industry.

Luckily, this post lets you find out if public utilities would be a good career path for you.

Some of the Common High-Paying Public Utilities Jobs

What Makes Public Utilities a Good Career Path?

Before finding out the reasons why we consider public utilities a good career path, you should be keen to know if there are any drawbacks associated with public utilities.

Well, making public utilities your career path does have its own downsides. On the one hand, the competition for majority of the desirable public utility positions is extremely stiff. The second downside, on the other hand, is that your public utility job will most likely compel you to operate within the confines of the job’s requirements, thereby preventing you from exercising a great deal of professional creativity.

If you dislike jostling for bureaucratic positions and highly competitive jobs, public utilities might not seem like the ideal career path for you. But if you think you can wade through stiff competition as well as cope with bureaucratic restrictions, then you shouldn’t shy away from giving public utilities a shot.

As a public utility worker, you’ll enjoy certain benefits, some of which private sector workers can only dream of. These benefits are alternatively viewed as the reasons why we consider public utilities a good career path.

High Assurance of Job Security

This is most likely one of the benefits that attract lots of people to public utility jobs. Unlike their counterparts in the private sector, public utility workers enjoy high assurance of job security. The normal way this works is that after years of serving in a public utility, the public utility worker becomes entitled to job security provided that they initially secured the job through a public contest.

However in the private sector, same cannot be said about the workers who could be fired even without committing any major wrongdoing. If a worker in a public utility were to be dismissed despite having received job security, it would be that they had been found guilty of major wrongdoing. Nonetheless, such a worker could appeal the dismissal (decision) provided they have cogent and sufficient grounds for defending themselves.

While public utility jobs often come with a good deal of stability, this, sadly, isn’t the case for private sector jobs; most private employers reserve the right to dismiss their employees at any moment even when the employees aren’t guilty of any wrongdoing.

Little or No Requirement for Industry Experience

The public utilities industry gives great leeway to young job seekers without any industry experience, thereby making it possible for them to land jobs. Majority of public utilities allow job seekers without any prior experience to compete for their job positions –including middle-level and higher-level positions. It’s only a few sectors within the public utilities industry that require specialized training –or some sort of industry experience –from their job applicants.

Assurance of Professional Progression

If you crave high and quick professional progression, you can count on a public utility job for the achievement of such progression. Often determined by years of service, the systems of progression adopted by public utilities enable their employees to advance in salary and position.

In addition to their consideration of employees’ years of service, most public utilities adopt well-established protocols in evaluating the employees’ competency and determining whether they are due for professional progression –salary boost and/or position elevation.

While on the same long-standing job in a public utility, you could be entitled to a kind of special bonus or some wage increase as a result of engagement in professional development activities such as completing an advanced class/degree relevant to your job title.

Benefits and Bonuses

Workers in public utilities are usually entitled to a variety of benefits and/or bonuses. Parts of these benefits and/or bonuses are award leave, pension, special allowance, paid leave, and special bonuses.

For instance, some public utility workers are entitled to a kind of bonus whose value is determined by the workers’ length of service. Based on this service length, the bonus manifests as a percentage of a worker’s salary. In this regard, a worker with a longer length of service will be entitled to a higher bonus percentage while their counterpart with a shorter length of service gets a lower bonus percentage.

Relatively High Wages

Though various factors determine employees’ wages, it’s beyond doubt that workers in public utilities are better remunerated than their private sector counterparts.

Some of the factors that influence your salary figure as a public utility worker may include level of education and nature of job title. If educational level is highly required for a particular public utility job, an employee with an advanced degree may be entitled to a wage figure higher than that of a colleague with a basic degree. As regards nature of job title, public utility jobs that appear generally complex may command higher wages.

The fundamental point here is that for a job where the two workers’ job title, level of education and level of experience are the same, a public utility worker is highly likely to earn better than a private sector worker.

Absence of Gender-based Wage Disparity

The fact that public utility jobs do not appeal to gender-based wage disparity is one of the reasons why the jobs are worth craving by anyone irrespective of their gender. While we can comfortably argue that some private sector jobs reward male employees better than their female counterparts, same cannot be said about public utility jobs.

Conclusion

Inasmuch as the public sector remains the largest employer of labor while still offering a host of beneficial packages to employees, choosing to start a career in public utilities might be worth it.