In the past six months, Sharonville Transmission Plant’s Ronnette Jenkins has achieved two major career milestones – her 30th year as a Ford employee Sept. 9, and her graduation from the UAW-Ford joint apprentice program as a journeyperson electrician on Feb. 4.

“I was a tech for 27 years before I decided to go into the program to be an electrician,” said Jenkins. “I had thought about it years ago, but as a single parent of two boys, it would have been very hard, and I couldn’t leave them for training.”

Jenkins began the program in 2017 and is grateful for the support of her co-workers and the knowledge they shared along the way. “They were all very encouraging and built up my confidence,” she said. “Sometimes people see things in you that you don’t see. I was very intimidated getting into a primarily male job, but they encouraged me to ask questions. They’d say, ‘Ronnette, you can do this. If you don’t believe you can do this, no one else is going to believe you can.’”

Right now, only 17 of the 361 skilled trades at Sharonville Transmission Plant are women, something Jenkins wants to see change. She encourages any woman looking for something different, for a challenge, to go through the apprenticeship program. Her program included completing 576 hours of classroom training and 8,000 hours of supervised work in the plant, divided into six-month rotations with various electricians.

“My last rotation was with Steve Marquardt and Mike Sitterlet,” she said. “Those two are awesome, and I’m so glad I had them last leading up to the exam. If I had any questions before I went up for graduation, they were very good about taking me out to show me what I needed to know.”

The daily challenge of working as an electrician for Ford is what Jenkins enjoys most. “You have to think and figure out things, which is very challenging and, to me, very interesting,” she said. “I like the fact that I’m learning every day.”