Going From Electrician to Quality Leader: Julie Stiglish’s Path Into QA/QC

Julie Stiglish’s path into quality and safety leadership didn’t start in a classroom or a compliance office. It started in the heat of a Las Vegas summer, wiring up casinos as a journeyman electrician, learning what it actually feels like to be tired, on a schedule, and still expected to get the work right. 

That background is exactly why her new course, Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals, doesn’t read like a compliance manual. Julie has been the person with the tools, the one whose Friday afternoon shortcuts (or lack of them) actually show up in the field years later. In this first clip from our interview, she walks through how she went from electrician to project management to safety to quality, and what finally pulled her away from the trade she started in.

Her answer gets at something a lot of quality programs miss: most defects aren’t about bad workers. They’re about systems that make the wrong thing easy and the right thing hard. That single realization is the thread running through her entire course.

Want the full breakdown of how she teaches quality management on real utility-scale projects? Don’t miss her Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals here.

Transcript below.

Could you tell us a little bit about your background?

My background is a little bit of a unicorn in the industry. I started out as an electrician. I had moved to Las Vegas and needed a job. I was working in a casino and I decided what I wanted to do was something that I could look at and be proud of all the time. I saw these giant casinos going up, and I thought, my dad works in the electrical industry, he’s a factory electrician, and I wanted to do something along those lines. I found a perfect opportunity to do that.

So I became an electrician and worked my way up into electrical foreman, and then went into some project management, and then I found safety. From safety I moved into quality, and I went to work for First Solar. And from First Solar, I went on to start my own consulting company.

So tell me how you ended up doing quality and safety work in solar after starting as an electrician. What made you make that shift?

When I started out as an electrician, I was the person on the tools, and it was busy schedules. Because I worked in Las Vegas, I was in the heat. So I knew what it was like to be in that industry, tired on a Friday, and still trying to get quality work done.

What pulled me towards quality was actually safety, realizing that most defects aren’t about bad workers. They come from systems that make the wrong thing easy to do and the right thing much harder.

As an electrician, I could fix my own work, and I learned how to protect myself in a very dangerous work environment. So I thought about what that does in the future for operations and maintenance, and how my quality work would affect the people who eventually had to work on it. I started thinking about how to fix the system. I had some great electrical mentors, but I also worked around guys that were like, hey, let’s just get it done. So I saw both sides of that, and that’s what shaped my decision to step out of electrical project management and go down the support side, quality and safety, to help protect the worker down the road.

Want more from Julie? Her full course, Utility-Scale Solar QA/QC Fundamentals, covers everything from the 1-10-100 rule to who actually holds the risk when quality is weak on a utility-scale site.