My name is Michelle Carter. I work at SaskEnergy in Distribution Engineering and I'm a Drafting Technician. I have been involved with the trade for roughly 12 years and I have been working at SaskEnergy now for just over three years.


SaskEnergy's role is:

handling the distribution of gas and facilities.
service to your home.
installing your metres.
making sure you get a safe gas supply to your home.

From this department we do the engineering. It then filters through the contractors and construction and through the Service Techs to supply it to.

[Decision To Enter This Occupation:]

The reason why I took Drafting was I had young kids at home, I needed to find a job and I needed something that was portable because I didn't know where I was going to be living at the time. Drafting at that time suited everything I could take.

[Education & Training:]

There was a ten-month course that SIAST was offering. It was competency based, so that worked out well. If I had to miss a couple of days with the kids being sick I could take work home and keep up with my classes. So I did the ten-month course and one thing led to another. I got contract work while I was still in school and just kept rolling along, getting referenced from one job to the next until I finally ended up here [SaskEnergy].

At SIAST the ten-month course was the Drafting Technician course and it gives you a good general aptitude to get a job in Drafting when you get out into the work force. You touch a little bit on electrical, mechanical, structural, architecture, and mapping. It just gives you a little bit on your plate so you can get a beginning job in the sector.

[Skills Needed:]

You have to be organized – organization is a big thing.
You have to be able to plan your day.
You have to be self-motivated.
You have to have research skills.
Know how to approach people if you have questions.
Learn as much as you can about the job that you are working on.
Work independently and with different groups of people.
I won't work with the same group all the time – I'll have Stakers and Surveyors, or Construction and Service Technicians, or the Engineers, the Technologists. So it's always a wide range of people.

[Typical Work Day:]

My daily routine is different every single day. Usually what I do is check through our messages and see if we have any incoming drawings or any incoming messages from some of the jobs that have been happening. Usually you know which projects you are working on so you start working on your projects for the day.

Somebody will come and they will need a rush job done. So you'll take them on and do a drawing or plot out a couple of drawings. People come in needing copies of maps, copies of station drawings or they want to check reg on a station (they want to know what size it is). So you go and pull the manual drawings or the AutoCAD drawings and check that for them.

We get a lot of outside calls where people are doing construction and they have to know what facilities are in their area. So they'll phone us and we'll send them the map out for the area that they are in so they know where all the gas lines are.

[Hours of Work:]

This day doesn't run from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm. Most of the time I tend to start when I get in and most of us don't leave here at 5:00 pm. It's one of these "it's hard to get out of this place" things because throughout the day you always have so many distractions and so many different things happening to you that you can't start work at 8:00 am and then leave at 5:00 pm. It doesn't really work that way. Lots of times you'll filter through.

For example: I will start at 7:30 am, work into the noon hour for half an hour or work through my coffee. You just flex your day. Whenever you have the time, you go and take it. Lots of times 5:15 pm (or 5:30 pm) is a pretty average day for most people to finally clear out of the office.

The most challenging aspect of this job would be:

staying on top of all the technology.
the change of what you are working with.
which industry you happen to be working in, because that is always changing.
keeping up with its terminology.
just trying to keep abreast of everything that is changing.

The most satisfying part of this job is:

if you can get a job from beginning to end, you can see how it started out and that you actually got it completed.
there is a little bit of pride there. "Yes, I had something to do with that and it does exist," rather than just on paper.
you see the real life object and it functions – so that's a good bonus right there.

The on-going training that we have is continual. This includes:

terminology
learning in the field
computer systems getting updated
new software packages

We try to stay on top of all of this as much as we can.

[Change & Adaptability:]

Since I started (12 years ago) there has been a tremendous amount of change. When I first started manual drafting was the norm. You spent the majority of your day doing manual drafting. About seven years ago we started getting a little more computerized drafting, whereas in the last five years it has been (I would say) one hundred percent computerized drafting and we get very minimal, minimal manual drafting.

Now anything that is manual we tend to convert to AutoCAD and use it in the digital format as opposed to manual. So as you see, there are no manual tables in here anymore. Everybody has a computer station that they set up. And the computers are getting faster…so you're thinking faster, you're working faster, and you tend to get into a whirlwind sometimes. Things in the last five years have really happened in this field.

[Advice For Someone Entering This Field Of Work:]

Go for it. There are two avenues you can go. If you can, start on the short one which is offered at SIAST and is a ten-month course. If you are not really sure Drafting is what you want and you do not have any experience like high school drafting and stuff, start on the short one offered at SIAST. It is a ten-month course and it would be a good test to one. It gives you enough skills to go out and get a job in the field and decide if you really like it.

If you have already had some drafting experience and you know that Drafting is what you want to do, I would go to Moose Jaw. I believe it is a three-year program now and it is a Drafting Technologist. I would recommend that one if you have a better idea Drafting is what you want to go into because you get more into design and there is a little more diversity for you to try out.