I have few real frustrations in life compared to a lot of people, and a lot of the ones I do have could aptly be described as 'first world problems'. Perhaps this is one of them. However, it is one that affects my career notably, so I make no apologies for writing a little piece on it. If you're an electrician, electrical service technician, or work in any of the related trades, I salute you. This piece is not meant to directly criticise you or your industry.
I'm not an electrician. Nor in fact, in the eyes of the Electrical Workers Registration Board (EWRB) of New Zealand, am I actually an 'electrical engineer' either. And to the layman, that might seem a little strange, if you read the other parts of this site. But life is complicated, and so are careers in electronics and technology.
I started out being a kid who was really interested in electronics and electrical stuff - in a very practical, hands-on way. I was also pretty good at school. I think when I was maybe 5-10 years old, I'd have told you that my dream job was being an electrician. It seemed like the coolest thing I could think of. However, as I got a bit older, and learnt more about things, a bit of an issue became apparent. I was also very interested in design, and creativity, and trying new and unproven things - and becoming an electrician didn't completely fit the bill. Upon getting through high school with good grades there was also a certain societal expectation that I'd go to University and study something academic. I could've resisted that - but it did seem like electrical engineering was the best fit for me. I was already well into understanding modern electronics, having done component-level repair and put together various small circuits like low-power battery chargers. Having a solid theoretical foundation, that you only really get with an academic degree, seemed necessary to go further.
But studying electrical/electronic engineering wasn't a perfect fit either. After my undergraduate studies, and a bit of work experience, largely in electronics design and manufacture, but also a little bit in the power systems industry, I decided to do a PhD - which on the face of it sounds like something even more academic and less practical. That's not entirely true though, because my PhD is in the sub-field of power electronics, which requires a very good understanding of practically building hardware and making things work. And at the same time, I was doing larger projects like my electric ride-on mower conversion that involved a lot of skilled hands-on work.
It was at about this time - circa 2022 - that I realised the trouble I was in. I love high-power stuff: things that are potentially a bit more dangerous than small-scale electronics and computers. Not because I'm a risk-taker at heart, but because renewable energy, electric machines, and battery systems are all built on it. And because I like doing things for myself, understanding them completely, and being practical. I don't like just buying black boxes and plugging them in, and then being at a loss when they break. I've done one, nearly two academic degrees - so I've got the theoretical knowledge. And from the projects and repairs I've been doing over the years, I have enough practical experience to make at least some claims about my abilities. No, my skillset is not entirely the same as an electrician’s - but I sure as hell can wire a plug. I've also been doing this sort of stuff for long enough to, for example, know the difference between a poorly-crimped connector that looks fine but will fall apart and become unsafe after a few years, and a proper job equivalent to what you'd expect from a trained worker. And that 'feel' for things is a skill that takes time to develop. You can't teach it in a lecture, nor can an electrical engineering degree really be modified to somehow instil it in people.
The problem for me is that in most contexts, you have to be a registered electrician to do some of the things I really like doing. Any kind of wiring that operates over a certain voltage is called 'prescribed electrical work' hence needs to be done by a registered electrician and signed off as compliant with the relevant wiring rules. According to the current regulations, those voltage limits are 120V DC or 50V AC. That's not too much of a problem for the average electronics hobbyist, as a lot of things operate below 12-15V, but once you get into power electronics like me... you run into that limit pretty quickly. Anything that operates at a power level of more than a few hundred watts is probably going to need to operate at a voltage level that violates those rules. In terms of home maintenance, there are limited exemptions for what you can do as a homeowner - you can replace wall socket outlets and light fittings, replace plugs and switches on appliances, and a few other things, and that's cool. But there are still a lot of things I'd like to do where the rules do get in my way.
Take for example my ride-on mower conversion. If you want an electric ride-on lawnmower that performs well, which was the point of my project, then you need a certain amount of power output, and in my case it was clear I wanted about 20kW to achieve my project's goals. And for that, you do need a fairly serious electrical system. The machine itself actually operates on a 72V DC battery system, so is below the limit to be considered prescribed work. That's a good thing. The difficult part is the battery charger, which has to connect to the grid. There are very few off-the-shelf options to charge a 72V battery system, and at least at the time I started the project there weren't any options that would allow me to charge the system at 3.6kW from a 15A wall socket, and also provide an inverter output to run mains appliances off of the battery in a power outage. A large part of this was the fact that 72V battery systems are less common than ones of other voltages such as 48V - and you might say I should've just used something more common, but there were also important reasons for using 72V. A lower voltage would require too much current to practically deliver the amount of power you need to run the machine (I already have to build everything to handle 300A at 72V to get the desired ~20kW power output), would have limited the maximum speed of the motors, and would also reduce battery capacity (fewer cells in series) or require different battery configurations, such as parallel strings (very much less safe in my opinion) or larger cells (for which there was no cost-effective option with the same approximate capacity). And any higher commonly-used voltage level would cross the limit for prescribed work, making my whole mower's electrical system 'prescribed' work. There were a few options from overseas sources that were potentially viable with some compromises - but they didn't have any relevant electrical certifications, and were from relatively unknown sources, so they weren't a solution to doing this properly/by the book either.
So I had to custom-design a power converter and build it into a prototype product to do this - a task that is entirely within my skillset based on my experience so far, very valuable and interesting to me, and quite necessary to make the project work, but also arguably not something I'm qualified to do because it involves wiring at voltage levels that imply it is prescribed work, and I'm not an electrician or an electrical service technician. Nor am I actually working in a research lab in this capacity - there are exemptions for research and development work in the electrical regulations on prescribed work, but I don't think my garage would hold up as a research facility in court. I thought very carefully about safety and did it anyway, didn't have any serious mishaps during development, and am quite confident in the finished product. Even so, I only run it under my own supervision - so there is very little risk being created here, and I don't feel like I'm being an irresponsible person. I'm far, far more likely to hurt myself or someone else by driving down the road in my car - and that's not because I'm a bad driver (I've had a license for nearly 10 years and have never been in an accident, touch wood, so I'm either extremely lucky or at least OK at it).
Nonetheless, it bothered me greatly that there was no way for that project to be done entirely in-line with the relevant electrical regulations. I would absolutely have gone to extra effort to do that if there was a reasonable way - I'm not just being lazy or a cowboy. But there are two problems that get in the way of that.
I said that being an electrician didn't entirely fit the bill for me. Truth is, doing electrical/electronic engineering degrees doesn't either. Upon running into the above conundrum, I definitely spent some time questioning my life choices. Was there something else I could have done, in terms of my career so far, that could have avoided this? And the answer I came to was... not really. Neither option was perfect, but studying at University was decidedly closer, for me. And doing both? Difficult. Neither career path was ever designed to be compatible with the other. There is overlap in what you learn, but no significant discount in the total time taken if you choose to do both. There's a reason conjoint degrees exist at University, and I'd actually say that the electrical trade and electronics engineering work are much more related than some of the conjoint programmes that exist! But you can't do a 'conjoint' of the two things. So doing both takes a huge amount of time. Each degree I've done is four years - if you're lucky. And electrician/electrical service technician training takes a similar amount of time. In addition to theoretical and skills training, becoming an electrician requires four years of work as an apprentice, and becoming an electrical service technician requires two. These are not jobs you go into casually. And for me? Here we are in 2026... I've spent more than 20 years in some kind of education system now, including most of the last eight at tertiary level, with the BE(Hons) and now the PhD. Do you really think that after all of this, I want to take on effectively another two to four year training program? I can't justify it. I'm not actually planning to work professionally as an electrician - I'd be in it only to be able to do specific things that require it every now and again. Important things, but not my main career - it's not worth four years of my life, of working full-time in a job I don't fully want to do. Or two, for electrical service technician, which has fewer benefits.
Doing it prior to university would have made no sense - I'd have missed some of the nicest years of the university experience that you can't go back to later - and doing it now also makes no sense when I'm kind of 'overqualified' for it.
And yet, I still think that there should be an easier way for me to get that qualification! And that's not quite as unreasonable as you might think. If you're an 18-year-old who has only ever played video games, yes, you really do need to do a big training program and spend four years under someone else's supervision before you should be allowed to work on people's electrical wiring. For me... there'd be plenty to learn, especially in terms of rules and standards, and some practical skills I might not have run into so far too, because I haven't worked professionally in the industry before. And it's not that I'm too cool for it with my PhD and all. It's not that I'm above being treated like an apprentice for a period of time. An understanding boss would help greatly, but it's not that I can't handle being talked down to. But for four years? Or two, to be an electrical service technician? The problem is, that completely discounts any prior practical experience that I may have, that I've actually acquired over a lot more than 2-4 years - and dismisses any advantage of my prior qualifications. And I think that's unfair too. I have no problem with any of the other theory/examination requirements, but the requirement for apprenticeship time is difficult for someone in my position.
What I'd love to see - which I know is unrealistic for a number of reasons - is a way for someone's practical skills to be examined and graded rather than simply proven over time in an apprenticeship. Yes, you need to work in the trade to be qualified in the trade - no question. But I'd just like to see an adjustment based your pre-existing skills... so that someone coming in with some pre-existing experience can spend only whatever time is actually needed to bring them to a sufficient skill level to have the qualification, rather than a flat 2/4 years. Then I'd do it - because I'd know that I'd actually be learning things the whole time, not just doing menial tasks that aren't furthering my education just to tick a box. Or to fulfil some unspoken social contract, that you have to 'do your time' as an underling.
But here's the second problem. If we go back to the battery charger example above, being an electrician, or electrical service technician, probably wouldn't actually help me do something compliant in that case. The problem is that alongside the prescribed work, I've actually created a prototype of an entirely new electronic device - which has no formal safety certifications and no compliance marks. It's also a device that contains digital circuits and switch-mode power supplies, and thus most definitely has the capability to cause radio interference, so should be certified in that regard as well as basic safety. I'm not mass-manufacturing and selling these devices, so I'm not breaking the law by supplying non-compliant equipment to other people... but that also means that there isn't any practical way for me to get safety certifications to make MY one-off unit 'compliant'. And neither of the above qualifications would help. It's not a 'compliant' piece of equipment, so there's no way for it to be 'signed off' anyway. Being registered and having the qualification doesn't allow you to do whatever you want, and so an installation or device with an uncertified component like my one-off battery charger can't just be approved by someone with a qualification. In fact, the EWRB and WorkSafe would probably look at you with even more scorn if you tried.
For repairing things, which I do a lot of, being an electrical service technician would be helpful when I want to do it for other people, or within an institution. But that's not going to be a particularly significant part of my career, and not something I'm looking to do professionally, so the benefits are marginal - and not really worth the two years, when I can generally do parts of the work and then rope in someone with the qualification to help finish the job. You might ask why I can't just rope in someone with the qualification to do the whole job - but the reality of electronics repair is that some parts of it require advanced, specialist skills and troubleshooting that you only get if you take MY career path - so only someone that does all of that AND gets one of the trade qualifications can technically do those repairs, which is unrealistic in practice for the reasons I've outlined above.
Similarly, for being a registered electrician, while there are occasionally things I'd like to do myself that I shouldn't because they're prescribed work, and which COULD be done by the book by an electrician and signed off, mostly there are other solutions available to me, such as just paying an electrician to do it, or doing some of the work and going through some kind of appropriate sign-off process with a qualified electrician. Again, I can't justify spending four years to get that qualification myself - but it still pisses me off.
Neither qualification solves my core problem, which is that creating bespoke prototypes like my battery charger as a personal project effectively cannot be done in a way that is entirely compliant with electrical regulations, no matter how competently you do it. And that's pretty much that. It is what it is.
Well that's a great question isn't it. Basically, there are two things going on here. One is the option to become a 'chartered engineer', which many people in the power systems industry do. This isn't a practical qualification and doesn't let you do prescribed electrical work. It's also not very common in electronics/power electronics, so has less advantage for me. The other thing is the option to be a registered 'electrical engineer' with the EWRB, which does let you do prescribed electrical work, and is a slightly better option for me than either electrician or electrical service technician, but doesn't fundamentally solve the problems I set out above. To my knowledge, it still won't give you the ability to sign off a system involving a bespoke electronic component operating at prescribed voltage levels, and it still takes two years of work in the trade, regardless of your previous practical skill level. Frustratingly, it was one year previously, but they increased it to two years in 2024. Which arguably is appropriate if you start with zero practical skills beyond what you learn in an electrical engineering degree - but gets more and more excessive the more prior experience you have. So it's really the closest thing to a 'conjoint' that exists, but I still see it as relatively unlikely that I'll ever decide to work for two years full time, doing largely an electrician's work. Again, if I could just do only as much professional work experience as is actually needed to get from where I am now to being qualified to do prescribed work - which I suspect is less than two years - then this option would make a lot more sense. But as it is, it doesn't.
I hope, if you actually read some or all of that, that it enlightened you on why it's difficult to become someone who likes to do novel engineering work in my field, but also be hands on and practical, and not break the law. If you're someone in a position of power, I hope you got some value out of reading this. I'm not really expecting change to the system, but I'd welcome any and all discussion about what the most appropriate options are for someone in my position, especially regarding bespoke prototypes - and whether things will change in the future, for better or worse. And of course, I hope you get it that I'm trying to be a responsible person both in my actions and in what I post online. If you can't see the forest for the trees on that, and instead want to use something I've posted online as evidence to get me in trouble, I have but three final words for you. Go f*** yourself. :)
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