[upbeat music]

(Describer) Title: I Can Be Anything I Want to Be, A to Z. The title turns and the background opens to the Career Lab, with kids working at different stations. A boy works on a fan.

♪

[grunts]

First rule of troubleshooting electronics: Have you tried turning it off and then on again? Yeah, but it still won't work. The motor doesn't want to start. I wonder if it's the wiring.

[pings]

(Describer) On a screen...

(female) Attention, attention. The Office of the Alphabet is calling with an urgent career request. Second rule of troubleshooting electronics: always be prepared to press pause for a career alert.

(female) Please stand by.

(Describer) The boy and two girls go to the screen, which goes through letters until it stops.

[beeping]

"E"! Excellent. There are great careers that start with "E." Educators, like teachers and professors. Engravers--maybe someone who helps create the designs for dollar bills. Engineers--there's literally a hundred different fields they could work in.

(Describer) On the screen...

[pings]

Electrician. This one might come in handy. It's a "hands-on" career, for sure. It is! And Ciara Dickerson is an electrician at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

(Describer) She presses a button.

Hi, Ciara. Hello, Lab Squad. Tell us about what you do as an electrician. There are three main categories of what electricians can do. And I am an indoor electrical wireman. That basically is a construction-level commercial industrial electrician. So, I would do outlets and lights in a school or a hospital. But you could also do residential or you could do a outdoor lineman, which is the people that do power lines. What other types of things do electricians do? You could use base knowledge as an electrician to get into other careers, like starting your own electrical company. You could become a city inspector. You could become a project manager and be in charge of the job, looking at blueprints and manage material. Or you could become an engineer and actually build those blueprints. Ciara, do you know how much electricity is used in the Empire State Building? Actually, I do. They use 10 million watts of power at peak demand, similar to 170,000 60-watt light bulbs. Wow, that's a lot of light. So, what's your favorite thing about being an electrician? My favorite thing about being an electrician is being super active in working with my hands. With this job, you switch up jobs every few months and see different buildings and places you wouldn't be able to go to otherwise. Thanks for talking to us today. Thank you for letting me tell you what I do. Good luck with your careers.

(Describer) The other girl presses the button.

[pings]

Electricians really do have an important job. Without access to safe electricity, many careers we've investigated wouldn't be possible. We call them if the lights go out. Or to fix my broken fan. Before we fix that, let's "spark" kids' interest in this career. I see what you did there.

(Describer) Titles: Think TV, CET, Public Media Connect. Copyright 2017 Accessibility provided by the US Department of Education.

Accessibility provided by the U.S. Department of Education.