An $80,000 Per Year Job of the Future: EV Charging Station Technician

At least one industry of the future will produce middle-class jobs that don’t require a college degree

Steve LeVine
The Mobilist

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Marshawn Porter is an EV charging station technician and trainer at ChargerHelp. Photo: Courtesy ChargerHelp

Techno-optimists tell us not to fear the age of robots and automation — that new jobs will replace those that are wiped out. Such talk has tended to ring hollow. What sort of jobs do the techno-optimists have in mind? Some folks have drawn up lists of possible “jobs of the future,” but are they to be believed?

Last week, I came across a genuinely new occupation: electric vehicle charging station technician. It’s a $39 per hour job, or $80,000 per year full-time, and requires just a week of training to know the basics, with no college necessary, according to Kameale Terry, co-founder and CEO of ChargerHelp, an EV charging station servicing company in Los Angeles. Terry’s company trains and employs such specialists.

If EVs go mainstream this decade, as a number of experts predict, tens of thousands of charging station technicians could be required, hard evidence that at least one industry of the future is going to produce well-paying, middle-class jobs that do not require an engineering degree. This future of EV and battery industry employment has been foreshadowed for a decade: In 2012, the year Tesla came…

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Steve LeVine
The Mobilist

Editor at Large, Medium, covering the turbulence all around us, electric vehicles, batteries, social trends. Writing The Mobilist. Ex-Axios, Quartz, WSJ, NYT.