WHY WE ARE HERE

VOLT's mission is simple:  To empower the energy and power professionals of tomorrow by offering them opportunities to broaden their horizons and enhance their skill sets today.  Sounds like your typical mission statement.

Until you hear the backstory.

The Challenge

In the fall of 2018, several of our founding members completed co-op rotations with organizations in the energy and power industry.  In talking with industry professionals, these students discovered that:

• The energy and power industry would soon face one of the largest turnovers in its workforce in its entire history, AND there weren't enough students focusing on the industry to replace those that would be leaving.  This rotation would offer one of the greatest job markets in the history of the industry over the next decade, AND NO ONE WAS TALKING ABOUT IT OUTSIDE THE INDUSTRY!
  

• Like every potential employer, members of the energy and power industry want future employees who are as well rounded as possible.  One executive said, "We know you can do the science; you have a degree that says you can.  We need people who have those intangible skill sets; the "soft" skills that are often the difference maker between success and failure of a project.

• The energy and power industry is full of people willing to invest their time and energy into mentoring and building the next generation of employees.  Only problem is, they don't know where to start.  "What department do I talk to at the school?"  "Would you be able to get credit for any type of mentoring program?"  These are just some of the questions that industry professionals asked, and we knew we had an answer.

The Advantage

It is very rare to find an opportunity where every party walks away not only happy, but in better shape than they were before the interaction.  But that is exactly what our founding members saw after meeting with these industry leaders.  They also knew that as students at UNCC, they had a distinct advantage that many other universities did not have:

• Location:  UNCC happens to be housed in one of two energy and power industry hubs in the continental United States. 
  

• Relationships:  Because of its prime location, UNCC has also developed strong, positive relationships with many members of the energy and power industry.  Regardless of the scope of each relationship, just the simple fact that they were already in place is a huge advantage.

• University Support:  UNCC provides its students a wealth of services in addition to education.  It also provides those students support when they identify a demand that needs to be met that university is unable to meet at that time for whatever reason.

The Opportunity

Given the advantages listed above, our founders began searching for a multi-disciplinary student organization that focused on both enhancing its members skill sets and providing access to industry networks.  Industry contacts had told them that if such an organization existed on campus, they would get behind it 100%. 

While they found there were many organizations on campus that focused on a specific discipline or industry, there weren't any that were multi-disciplinary that focused on the energy and power industry.  That left them with one option:  Start their own.

Which is EXACTLY what they did.