Wired for Success

At Statesboro High School, instructor Josh Hall’s Construction Career Pathway helped launch a pair of former students to full-time electrical careers in their hometown. Perry Hattaway (Class of 2023) works as an electrician at Georgia Southern University, while Tanner White (Class of 2024) enjoys a similar role for ACE Electric. Following is a look at their respective journeys into these rewarding careers.

Perry Hattaway
For Perry, a combination of classroom learning, a part-time job, and the experience of SkillsUSA competition helped him see the potential of a career as an electrician.

Initially Perry wasn’t planning to compete in SkillsUSA, but when a student had to leave the SHS team as it prepared for the state TeamWorks competition in 2023, Hall asked him to fill in as the group’s electrician. The team ended up winning the state TeamWorks championship and Perry came away enthused about his role in the process.

“SkillsUSA was a really enjoyable experience,” he says. “My teammates were people I had known for a really long time. I had grown up with them, so we had really good communication together. And I enjoyed being able to provide something that no one else could.”

The SHS TeamWorks championship drew attention from the local newspaper, and the coverage caught the eye of an electrician, Jesse Hopkins, who attended church with Perry at Statesboro’s Pittman Park Methodist. Hopkins invited Perry to work with him, which he did for nearly a year before applying for his current job at Georgia Southern.

“I really enjoy the fact that I can go out and do hands-on work,” Perry says of his job at GSU, whose sprawling Statesboro campus serves some 26,000 students. “Another thing I enjoy is that it’s something different every day. There’s always something new to learn or experience.”

Perry anticipates becoming a GSU student himself, while continuing his work as an electrician.

“I’m definitely happy with where I am right now,” he says. “I want to continue my education, which is why I chose to work with Georgia Southern. I think one really good option for me would be construction management, so that’s something I’ll probably look into.”

It all started with Hall’s program at Statesboro High, and Perry recognizes the foundation it established for a fulfilling job he landed less than a year after graduating.

“It was a really great experience, being exposed to that subject matter pretty early on and being able to learn it with my friends in a fun environment,” he says. “It gave me a good baseline where I was able to learned a little bit about everything construction-related.”

Tanner White
Tanner enrolled in Hall’s Construction Pathway as a freshman. Three years later he landed a summer job with a local general contractor, C. Merrill Construction, and when he returned to school as a senior that fall, “I missed it a lot,” he says. Then his vision for the future really began to come into focus.

“Tanner was a leader for each of his teachers and we all saw great things in him,” Hall explains. “In class one day, I mentioned what project managers do, and Tanner heard something that sparked his interest. A few weeks later I got a call from an industry member who strongly supports my program. They were looking for an entry level estimator, and I immediately thought of Tanner. I shared the info with him and within the next week he started working.”

That job was with the local office of ACE Electric, where Tanner began a part-time job in January of 2024.

“I helped our estimators with takeoffs,” he recalls. “Basically, they would give me a set of plans, and I would go through and count out how many light fixtures there were, how many single-pole switches, how many three-way switches – every single fixture that went into the building, I counted, and then I would give that number back to them so they can base the estimation off of it.”

When Tanner graduated from SHS, his role transitioned to full-time, and ACE began sending him out to gain hands-on experience in the field.

“I’ve been in the field since the last week of May,” he says. “Everything I learned in the classroom, and training and practicing for those skills competitions, was the groundwork for everything that I’m doing now.”

Tanner is now a full-time college student as well, majoring in construction management at Georgia Southern.

“I feel very lucky to know what I want to do,” he says. “I am making probably more than people who are just doing a part-time job. It comes with a lot of responsibility, but I love it.

Most people spend a lot of time looking for that, so to already love my job and know what I’m going to get to do in the future, I enjoy every day of it.”