The exam cost $113.10

On June 8 I drove to Calgary, sat down at one o'clock, and answered 100 multiple-choice questions. Parking cost me $4.75.

That was the last paper I had left on a 2nd Class Power Engineer's ticket. It took me thirteen years to get into that room.

If you don't work in a plant, that sentence means nothing to you. Fair enough. It means nothing to most of the people who ask me what I do for a living.

So here's the plain version.

A power engineering ticket is a licence to be legally responsible for pressure equipment. Boilers, turbines, heat exchangers, the things that hold heat and pressure and will hurt somebody if they're run badly. Alberta has five classes. 5th is the door. 1st is the top. I sat at 3rd Class for years, and that's the ticket that let me do the job I do at a SAGD facility in northern Alberta.

I finished at SAIT in 2013. That's thirteen years of writing papers in the gaps.

Nobody frames these. They're not achievement certificates.

Each class raises the size and type of plant you're legally allowed to be responsible for, and which chair you're allowed to sit in inside it. Assistant engineer. Shift engineer. Chief engineer. A 1st Class ticket lets you supervise any plant of any capacity in the province. A 2nd covers any heating plant and a much wider range of power plants than a 3rd does.

That's the whole mechanic. The ticket doesn't make you better at the job. It changes what you're permitted to be accountable for.

People expect this bit to be expensive.

That's the fee side. All of it.

If you Googled "what does a 2nd Class ticket cost" you'd get a number like that and think it was cheap. Same mistake as pricing a marathon at the registration fee.

I work a rotating shift. Seven days on, seven off, seven nights on, seven off. Twelve-hour shifts, all of them. Sixty to seventy percent of my training volume happens in those off-blocks, because a twelve-hour shift and a bus ride don't leave much.

The studying didn't come out of that pot. I did all of it at work.

Not in camp. On shift, at the panel, when the plant was running smooth. A quiet twelve-hour shift is two to five hours of study time if you bring the books. The off-blocks stayed training. I never sat down and decided that. It's just that the hours I'd defend were the ones with a barbell in them.

So the ticket didn't cost me a single session. It cost me the quiet hours of a lot of rotations.

The exam is a different story.

In June I said it ate that week. The log agrees, in a narrower way than I remembered. That block was five days at home, June 4 to June 8. June 4: a lift. June 5: a 45-minute ride and an hour under the bar. June 6: a pool swim, then 42.2 km on the road bike, a hundred minutes in the saddle. June 7: a 7.2 km run and another lift. Seven sessions in four days.

Then a hole. June 8 and June 9, both blank. Not one thing logged either day.

Week one of the bulk was supposed to be six lifts. It was three. Sitting in the middle of it: a 150 km drive to Calgary and a three-hour paper.

So it isn't the studying that shows up in the log. It's the exam, and it costs two days, not a week.

There's a second cost that doesn't show up anywhere. I was booked to write this same paper on April 14 in Edmonton. That sitting was cancelled. I'd paid the $113.10 in March and paid it again in April to rebook into June. Two months of momentum, gone, for reasons that had nothing to do with me.

This is the bit I'd want somebody to tell me.

Passing the papers doesn't hand you the certificate. ABSA's requirement has two halves: you pass the exams, and you show qualifying operating experience — a couple of years in a chief, shift, assistant shift or assistant engineer chair in a plant that's legally required to have one. There are a few combinations, and the right course or diploma buys some of that time back.

Then it renews annually, like insurance.

Both halves have to land. Mine did. In August it came through. 2nd Class.

You want a number here. I'm not giving you mine.

Here's something more useful. I went looking for what this ticket pays in Alberta and the sites don't agree with each other. One puts a 2nd Class average near $78,000. Others quote "power engineer" around $124,000. The bands underneath run from the low forties into the one-forties.

That gap isn't research failing. It's the answer. "Power engineer" and "2nd Class power engineer" get quoted as if they're the same job, and they aren't — one is a trade, the other is a specific licence sitting somewhere inside it. What you actually make depends on the plant, the rotation, whether you're camp or commute, and which chair you're in. The ticket only moves the last one.

It doesn't hand you a raise. It makes you eligible for rooms you weren't eligible for before. The money follows the responsibility, on a lag, and only if you go and take it.

I'm not a financial advisor. This is one guy's read on his own trade.

Here's what I keep coming back to.

For most of thirteen years this thing did nothing visible. Write a paper. Nothing changes. Write another one. Still nothing. There's no week where you feel it working. It's inert right up until it isn't, and then it's not an improvement, it's a category change.

I've seen that shape before. It's the same shape as the other boring things I've stuck with. Small, unremarkable, invisible for a long time, and then the line bends and people want to know what you did differently. I didn't do anything differently. I just didn't stop.

If you're twenty-four in a plant right now wondering whether the studying is worth it: the pass mark is 65%. Anything above it counts exactly the same.

Next week, I gave AI a portfolio and put it up against the S&P 500.

Reply and tell me what credential you're sitting on the fence about. I read every one.

— Kiegan