Christopher VanIwarden Story:
A Navy Nuclear Trained Electronics Technician, First Class Petty Officer (E-6) with over six years of naval experience as a nuclear electronics technician. He served in a variety of qualified capacities, but most importantly he qualified as Shutdown Reactor Operator and Propulsion Plant/Reactor Operator. Duties involved operating a nuclear reactor plant in accordance with approved operating, maintenance repair and casualty procedures. He provided overall reactor plant supervision in the absence of the Engineering Duty Officer and system knowledge for ship’s force during routine maintenance and shipyard overhauls. He is a
lso experienced in preventative and corrective electrical and electronic maintenance on Voltmeters, ammeters, ohmmeters and other test equipment.
Christopher transitioned out of the Navy in March 2019 and started a job with Urenco as an Operator III, where he conducted field and control room tasks to ensure the safe and compliant operation of complex integrated centrifugal enrichment systems. While employed at Urenco in this capacity he became well versed in distribution level switching and troubleshooting involved with supplying 13.8KV power to the enrichment facility, coordinated testing with local transmission system operators for running on board backup diesel generator units.
As Christopher was holding his position at Urenco, he had this desire and passion to pursue a career path in the utility industry that would be rewarding, but yet challenging so he embarked on a new quest to go back to his active-duty roots in the power plant and decided it would be interesting to become a Certified NERC System Operator. He was introduced to the Power4Vets program by various of his Navy Coworkers and made the call to our team and his journey with Power4Vets started in March 2021. He completed all of the Power System Operations course modules by June 2021 and then pushed forward in the NERC Preparation Certification portion of the program, passing the NERC Reliability Coordinator exam in July 2021. Our Human Resource Placement team worked with him as he was finishing up his studies for the NERC exam and he landed his dream job with the City of Redding as a System Operator in his location of choice in January 2022.
We are grateful for Christopher for trusting in the Power4Vets program and process to help achieve his quest for landing his dream job in the utility industry.
Words from Christopher VanIwarden
The Training and material provided to me from the IncSys team were top of the line and absolutely imperative in being able to certify as a Reliability Operator with NERC. After I completed the coursework, Robin Podmore and David Wilke were pivotal in providing crucial and personalized study assistance and exam preparation. Lastly, I cannot express how grateful I am to David Miranda for walking side by side with me during the whole process in order to ensure I was able to acquire the job that I wanted in a new career that I am passionate about.