Wired for What's Next: How ETASV Trains Silicon Valley's Electricians on Bluebeam

Facing a historic surge in data center construction, the Electrical Training Alliance of Silicon Valley is teaching apprentices and journeymen to build in Bluebeam, turning union-trained electricians into the workforce the industry now demands.

Ask Chris Paup what he wants people to understand about becoming a skilled electrician, and he doesn’t start with tools or code books.

“Gone are the days of just showing up and working with your hands,” he said. “Technology has implemented itself in this industry in so many different ways and so many different facets that you really have to take control of your own education in order to further your development in this field.”

Paup would know. He teaches the Bluebeam Fundamentals course at the Electrical Training Alliance of Silicon Valley (ETASV), the apprenticeship jointly funded by International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) Local 332 and the National Electrical Contractors Association (NECA) Santa Clara Valley chapter. It’s a school that has spent the past several years preparing for a moment that has now arrived: one in which the electricians it trains are being asked to build the physical foundation of the AI era, and to do it with software in hand.

From Costco to a golden ticket: the making of a training director

Albert Lancaster runs ETASV. As training director, he oversees the school, its instructors and its curriculum, and he came to the role the same way his students come to the trade. He did not grow up planning to run one of the largest electrical apprenticeships in the country. In his early 20s, he was moving from job to job, from customer service at Safeway to a stint at Costco, until his mother, an administrator at a small fire-alarm contractor in Concord, California, got him a job there as a delivery driver. He took to the work, became a fire-alarm technician, and spent about five years installing and programming systems alongside union electricians on jobsites.

“They were like, ‘Hey, you need to go sign up for the union,’” Lancaster recalled. “I never considered that.” He applied to the Santa Clara County electrical apprenticeship in 2011, got in, and completed the five-year inside wireman program. For Lancaster, newly married with a newborn at the time, the acceptance call changed everything.

“It was like getting a golden ticket,” he said. “The IBEW Local 332 apprenticeship changed my life, and it changes a lot of our apprentices’ lives, if not all of them, for the better.”

Directly out of the program, he was offered an instructor position. The school had noticed something in him during his own apprenticeship. “I always had a knack for helping my fellow students,” he said. “I had a knack of being able to explain certain concepts to some of my peers who were having a difficult time.” He taught while working as a foreman and general foreman for Smith & Sons Electric, and in 2023 he became the school’s training director.

Why ETASV built an 85,000-square-foot training center

When Lancaster talks about why ETASV moved into an 85,000-square-foot facility in Milpitas, he doesn’t frame it as an upgrade. He frames it as preparation for the surge of data center and electrification work now landing in Silicon Valley.

“We knew we needed to build a state-of-the-art facility to train our apprentices to man the inevitable flood of work that is coming our way,” he said. The old building couldn’t do it. “We were severely lacking in terms of hands-on training capability for our apprentices, and technology training for our apprentices. So our committee wisely made the move to acquiring a much bigger, more capable training facility.”

The clearest measure of the change is the computer lab, where students learn Bluebeam. The old building had 16 desktops. The new one has 40 to 50 stations, which is the difference between teaching Bluebeam one class at a time and building it into the core of the curriculum.

Lancaster is direct about what that surge of work actually is, and where the trades sit inside it. “When I think of AI, I don’t typically think of the user interface,” he said. “What I think of is the backbone behind it, and the infrastructure needed to power the AI. That’s where our training center comes into play, teaching apprentices how to build that electrical infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence for the future.”

How a union electrician is trained in Silicon Valley

For anyone outside the trades, the path from applicant to journeyman is more rigorous than they might expect. ETASV fields roughly 7,000 applications a year, so many that Lancaster has scaled back outreach events, for about 140 apprentice slots. Applicants must have a high school diploma and at least two semesters of algebra, then pass an aptitude test in reading comprehension and math, then clear an oral interview before landing on an ever-changing rank list that hovers around 2,000 people. ETASV calls its 140 from the top of that list each year.

Those who make it start with a two-week boot camp, held every night from 5 to 8 p.m., covering orientation, safety training, the tools of the trade and a financial literacy class, because many apprentices are about to earn more than they ever have. “We want to give them the tools to effectively manage those paychecks,” Lancaster said, “not go out and get the truck loans and the house loans and all kinds of crazy debts right away.” The final night is family night, with a dinner, a raffle and a tour, an acknowledgment that the support system matters as much as the curriculum.

From there, apprentices work full time in the field while attending class two nights a week. The requirements vary by track: an inside wireman needs 8,000 on-the-job training hours and 930 hours of classroom instruction, while a residential wireman needs 4,800 and 450. Those milestones let them change their union classification from apprentice to journeyman. The whole system is funded by two parent organizations, IBEW and NECA.

That partnership, Lancaster said, is the engine of the whole operation. “NECA is responsible for going out and getting the work and retaining the market share we have in the area. The IBEW is responsible for providing the workforce that can do the work well and do it safely.” In Santa Clara County, the customers on the other end of that work are not small. “We have very high-profile customers in our backyard — Google, Microsoft, HP, NVIDIA,” Lancaster said. “All these really high-profile clients that expect nothing less than excellence.”

A career that started on a wakeboard boat

Paup did not set out to become an electrician. He started in DC electrical work, in circuit and component design and audio systems, and found his way into fabrication, building show cars and working on yachts. In 2015, he was wiring a wakeboard boat for a customer who happened to be a fifth-year apprentice with IBEW.

“He’s like, what are you doing here? Come make some real money. Come be an actual electrician,” Paup recalled. He called in sick the next day, applied during the open window and got in. “It’s been the best decision I ever made, by far.”

Paup treated the apprenticeship as more than a job. During summers and breaks, he took every upgrade class he could, and after his third year he signed up for a course on software called Bluebeam. His instructor was Chris Doyle, the same Chris Doyle he now teaches alongside. Paup was, by his own account, the first one in the classroom and the last to leave every session.

That course sent him down a path toward planning, material takeoff and constructability. By his fifth year as an apprentice, Cupertino Electric took a chance on him with a spot in its preconstruction department, where he eventually became a foreman in the public infrastructure division, planning water treatment plants and other public projects. He completed the apprenticeship and became a journeyman in 2021. In November, he took a position as a business representative for Local 332 at the union hall, giving him a rare vantage point on both what contractors need and what the workforce can supply.

The moment Bluebeam clicked

For Paup, the value of Bluebeam became clear when he discovered custom columns, the feature that lets a user attach data and calculations to markups.

“That’s really where it clicked,” he said. “This thing isn’t just a PDF software. These aren’t just lines and shapes I’m drawing. I can assign attributes to these things. I can create calculations using these things.”

Paup’s first tool set solved a real problem on the Westfield Valley Fair mall expansion, a Cupertino Electric project. The team needed to figure out how much slurry to order for a duct-bank fill and how much dirt would have to be hauled away. Paup built a tool set that calculated the volumes automatically and shared the results with his general foreman. “That was the first time where I’m like, wow, I can do a lot with this,” he said. On a personal level, he believes the tool set he built was part of what got him noticed for preconstruction.

Today he describes the software in broader terms than most of his students arrive with. “Bluebeam is a software that can be utilized by both the field and project management and the planning side of the crew that’s actually running the job,” he said. “You can use it for material planning, installation, tracking, project management. It’s really the most universal tool that you can have on the construction site.”

How a Bluebeam course got built on a military deployment

Paup built ETASV’s Bluebeam Fundamentals course from scratch in an unusual place. A master sergeant with the 129th Rescue Wing of the California Air National Guard, Paup deployed to the Middle East in 2022. Before he left, he and the school’s director had been talking about the classes ETASV was missing, chief among them a course on the fundamentals of Bluebeam.

“What does it look like to be a journeyman in the field who was just promoted to foreman, and you get handed this laptop with this software you’ve heard about but never opened?” Paup said. “What are those fundamental steps, those basic principles you need to be effective?”

So he used his free time overseas to build the program, and he had two ideal test subjects: two fellow service members who had never worked in construction and had never touched software like Bluebeam. If a lesson landed with them, it would land with anyone. Paup went back and forth with the two of them, finding the gaps in his own explanations and the prerequisite concepts he’d skipped over.

He thought he had a solid program when he got home. Then he put 20 people in front of it. “It’s much different,” he said. “You learn: OK, these 12 understood how to do this, but I had a big miss with these eight.” Over the next few offerings, he refined it into the course he teaches today, one he’s now revising again to fold in Bluebeam Max, the AI-powered version of the tool. Roughly 200 students have come through it since.

The journeyman who saw the digital shift coming

If Paup came to the trade unconventionally, Chris Doyle was born into it. He got in around 1988, at 17 going on 18, following his father into the trade after a stint checking groceries. “The joke that kept going around was that I was born the same year that everybody else graduated high school,” he said. “Now I’m the old guy.” In the years since, he has watched the industry become more reliant on digital solutions from the inside.

His own turning point came at the electrical contractor Sprig Inc., where he took his first office job as a Title 24 compliance officer, generating documents for drawings. He realized the state’s compliance forms could be automated, so he rebuilt them all in Excel. “It took me about three months,” Doyle said, “but jobs that were taking a couple of days were taking a couple of hours.” That was the beginning of a career spent merging Bluebeam and Excel into a single system he now teaches.

Doyle is candid about what the software is and isn’t. “Software companies are there to sell licenses. They are not there to be best friends of electricians or plumbers,” he said. “It’s got to be as autonomous as it can be so everybody can find whatever value they need in it.” What he teaches, he says, is not the program so much as a way of working, a system built from years of working for different contractors and figuring out what actually holds up in the field.

Why the data center boom is raising the bar for electricians

Doyle argues that the data center boom hasn’t just increased the volume of electrical work. It has raised the technical floor for everyone doing it.

“The level of technicality just in the requirements of the jobs is rising dramatically,” he said, “from single lines to ladder logic and the understanding of how these systems are supposed to work.” As the work becomes more reliant on digital solutions, he added, it requires a more technically competent electrician. “And that’s across the board. That’s not just the people that are running the jobs. That’s the people that are building it.”

The reason is unforgiving arithmetic. “At the end of the day, if there’s any mistakes in a UPS system, you’re talking about millions of dollars in downtime,” Doyle said. “The bar is very, very high, not just because we as an institution here want it to be, but because that’s what the industry demands.”

Lancaster sees the same shift from the hall’s side. “The skills that are required for job calls nowadays far exceed that from even five to six years ago,” he said. Journeyman wiremen still need the fundamentals, but now they also need base computer knowledge and the ability to navigate drawings on a tablet in the field.

Two Bluebeam courses that build on each other

Paup’s and Doyle’s courses are designed to be taken in sequence. Paup’s course starts from the fundamentals and assumes no prior knowledge, providing the foundation before students progress to Doyle’s more advanced material.

“It takes you from step one, this is what the icon looks like, this is how to pin it to your taskbar,” Paup said. From there, students learn to navigate the interface, draw shapes, assign attributes and build the custom columns that make the software powerful. “It’s the foundation of how to build the back end of those tool sets.”

Then they walk into Doyle’s class. A detail manager at Redwood Electric, where he works on an active data center project in Reno, Nevada, Doyle hands students what Paup describes as a profile packed with a gigantic tool set and roughly 100 custom columns, built over years, and teaches them to design real projects with it. Paup builds the engine; Doyle teaches students to drive.

Doyle’s opening lesson is about systems, and about how dated construction workflows can look up close. “If you were to try to explain it to an alien, it’s absolutely archaic,” he said, describing how an owner hands a lump sum to a general contractor who parcels the work out to subcontractors who often have never met, all working from drawings produced by yet another party. His answer to that chaos is standardization. He points out that data centers are very similar from one to the next, so there are ample opportunities to create repeatable processes. “There’s an execution that can be about 80% the same,” he said. “So we shouldn’t have to start at zero like most projects tend to.”

Doyle pulls workflows from his real jobsite work with Redwood Electric straight into the curriculum. One first-class exercise he calls “the EV charger problem” hands students a real charging station plan, with a genuine voltage-drop error buried in it where a ground wasn’t upsized, and asks them to find it. “Feel free to cheat and share as much as you want,” he tells them, “because that’s what you’re going to do in the field.”

What it looks like when Bluebeam clicks for a student

Most of Paup’s students arrive cold, assuming Bluebeam is just markup software. Undoing that assumption is the job. Paup introduces the class to basic use cases of Bluebeam first, then builds toward what the software can really do.

“There’s not a lot of understanding of how in-depth you can actually get with it,” he said, describing how it can plan, track changes and serve as a project management narrative tool if the back end is built right. “Every time we introduce a concept like that, there’s a lightbulb moment. They go, ‘I could do that just by drawing this line?’”

The real shift, he said, is when students stop learning the software and start applying it to their own problems. “That’s when you see them showing up 45 minutes early, an hour early, because they’ve been thinking all day about how they can do this and they can’t wait to get to the classroom to try it.”

Doyle sees the same thing from the design side, and he can point to results. Several apprentices who took his class, showing up early or attending on nights they weren’t scheduled, have already landed office jobs as detailers. “To get a basic set of skills, so that when you go into any office environment and somebody sits you down in front of a computer, you at least have a direction,” he said, “I think is really, really valuable.”

Discipline from another uniform

Paup’s military service shapes how he teaches. He built his course around a three-point touch model used in Navy and Air Force training: introduce a concept, have students practice it, then review it the next session.

“If you have three touch points to a concept, you’re predominantly going to understand it and be able to move forward,” he said.

His role in the Guard, a first sergeant responsible for the readiness and well-being of his personnel, shows up in the classroom in a way students don’t expect: ergonomics. Field electricians know pinch points, fall hazards and ladder safety, Paup noted, but a desk is a new kind of hazard. So he teaches curved monitors, standing-desk posture, ergonomic mice and blue-light glasses, the repetitive-motion realities of an eight-hour day at a keyboard. “Those are things that will break you down over decades,” he said. “I build in part of the class on how you take care of yourself going into this new venture.”

Why the course counts toward certification

The Bluebeam Fundamentals course goes beyond only teaching Bluebeam skills and knowledge; it also counts toward continuing education. The course runs 54 hours of classroom instruction and application, well beyond the continuing education hours a journeyman needs to renew their California license, which happens every three years.

“It’s incredibly important for those hours to be on things that are new and upcoming, construction technology, not just concepts that have been around for 40 years,” Paup said. “The purpose of continuing education is so you don’t get stale. This helps them stay on the forefront.”

It’s also why Paup has come to think of ETASV as something other than a school apprentices pass through. “It’s really not just an apprenticeship training center,” he said. “It’s a lifelong learning center that our journeymen and our apprentices can take advantage of throughout their entire time.”

The certification that could change how work gets called

There is a bigger prize on the horizon, and it points at how the trades themselves are organized. When a contractor needs workers, they call the union hall and can request specific certifications, such as confined space or high voltage. For Bluebeam, the most a contractor has been able to ask for is “experience preferred,” because there was never a way to verify a worker’s actual skill.

Doyle notes that technical calls for software skills were historically unreliable. “There was no way for the hall to validate that someone actually had those qualifications,” he said. What’s changed is that the demand is now real. “Contractors really do need people with these skills, so the calls are going in, and those are legitimate calls asking for people who have that skill set,” he said.

That’s where ETASV’s courses could become something more than training. Once Doyle finishes building out the full five-course series and its final exams, the school will be able to issue completion certificates that mean something verifiable. Lancaster sees the same opening. “We can give our membership completion certificates,” he said. “We would just have to get NECA to sign off on the acceptance of those certificates, which I don’t think would be a hard thing.” The endgame: a contractor calling the hall and requesting, specifically, a Bluebeam-certified electrician.

Is construction technology only for architects and GCs?

There’s a persistent perception in construction technology that tools such as Bluebeam are built for general contractors and architects, not the people in the field. Paup rejects it flatly.

“The shift is happening. Technology is not going away. It’s becoming more integrated into our workflows,” he said. “The concept of ‘I’ll never touch a computer as a journeyman in the field’ is going to be over pretty soon. In the next five to six years, instead of getting handed a printout, paper’s going to be obsolete. You’re going to get an iPad on the job. You need to know how to navigate these things to stay relevant, to stay future-proofed in your own career.”

That conviction is why ETASV built the courses in the first place, and why the school sees them as central to keeping union labor competitive. “We have to as an industry,” Paup said. “Or we’re just going to get passed by.”

Lancaster frames it as a matter of identity as much as strategy. When people think about construction training, he points out, they picture universities and construction-management degrees, not apprenticeships and the trades. Changing that, he said, is central to what ETASV is doing: proving that a union training center can put its members at the front of where the industry is heading, not behind it.

Building the backbone of the AI era

ETASV is the largest electrical apprenticeship in Northern California, with about 600 students today, a number Lancaster expects to reach roughly 740 within a year as the school grows to meet demand. But he is deliberate about the pace. “I cannot swell up the apprenticeship to 800, 900, 1,000 apprentices, and then a job closes out and we have 200 apprentices out of work,” he said. “There has to be some sort of responsible growth.”

The stakes behind those numbers are hard to overstate. Doyle, who has watched booms and busts across a long career, is blunt about this one. “This one’s going to be something else,” he said. The Bay Area is the epicenter of a data center building boom with no clear end in sight, and the electrical trades are on the front line of it.

Nationally, NECA estimates about 10,000 electricians retire each year while only some 7,000 enter the trade, a shortfall so pressing it has drawn responses from the biggest names in tech. Google has pledged funding to the Electrical Training Alliance, the national IBEW-NECA apprenticeship organization, to help train more than 100,000 electrical workers and 30,000 apprentices. The workers ETASV trains today are the ones who will build the physical backbone of the AI era.

Doyle puts the moment in terms that go beyond any single tool. “We have this opportunity to really mold people for jobs that don’t exist yet,” he said. “And we’re figuring that out as we go.” For Lancaster, the reward is simpler and older than any of it, the graduation handshakes, the students who come up to thank him. “Just to hear from where they started to where they’re at now, how their life has improved tenfold,” he said. “That never gets old for me, because that happened to me.”

The infrastructure of the AI era is being poured, wired and energized right now, mostly out of sight, by people whose names will never appear on it. In a classroom in Milpitas, two nights a week, they are learning how.

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