Replacing the Purple Unicorns in P&C

Well-paying employment opportunities in the electric power industry are around every corner, particularly openings for P&C engineers and technicians which can be found in countless listings on LinkedIn and elsewhere.

Not listed are “purple unicorns,” those key workers who have multi-disciplinary skill-sets and handle vital, non-category roles that no one else in P&C can perform…or even wants to. If they quit or die, replacing them can be a heavy lift for HR; recruiting and hiring defined roles in P&C is tough enough let alone finding one-off abstractions. I wonder how many openings have come about from companies losing their purple unicorns, and how many resources they need to replace them effectively.

A different kind of animal…

There was a time when “protection engineer” and “relay technician” weren’t things either, when system protection was nascent, merely a concept. Necessity drove invention, of course, and here we are today where the roles P&C engineers and technicians perform are much broader than their job titles suggest.

On any given network, protection and control schemes could employ tried-and-true electromechanical, multi-function computerized, or even entirely virtual relays. Each type has its own operational characteristics, its own format of data, and its own set of specific software systems alive in the background of utility and industrial operations.

Protection engineers and relay technicians do their jobs until they can’t, which is to say the software systems used in their area of O&M at their place of employment – for tracking protection system devices, relay settings, test procedures and results, and associated office-to-field workflows – are great when they work but that’s not always the case.

Purple unicorns enter the picture to resolve such issues when others cannot. Keeping operational and technical aspects of software tools in sync and ready in P&C has pretty much always been their domain. Knowing not only protection theory and specific details about relays across the gamut of model/style and application variations, they also understand workflow processes and know how to stitch together software functions that support operations.

…at the edge of extinction

As power delivery modernizes, perhaps purple unicorns are becoming less aberrant, their defining skills less unique. Now, specialists can use commercially available software to create integrated data ecosystems out of P&C systems-of-systems. Further, the boundaries separating P&C workers and systems from others in O&M are narrowing.

Implementations of substation automation are already bearing this out. Network timing and communication protocols defined by the IEC 61850 standard series, for instance, are tightening collaborations between P&C engineers and technicians to the point where the space purple unicorns have traditionally occupied is beginning to vanish.

Amid escalating demand for electricity and pressures to de-carbonize, companies throughout the electric power industry are at a crossroads where business-as-usual ways and means just won’t cut it. This era is increasingly calling for P&C workers with computer science and even process efficiency skill-sets on top of traditional protection and control mastery. Wearing multiple hats isn’t uncommon in P&C work, but in these unprecedented times, multi-disciplinary skills and knowledge are in demand and are beginning to roll up into standard qualifications of the job.

Authored by: Joe Stevenson