How to become a wind turbine technician

Nobody looks at your diploma when hiring for the field. They look at three things, and none of the three is really learnable — you either have it or you do not:

• How you are with heights. At 80 to 120 metres, inside a narrow steel tube, can you climb the ladder when the lift is broken? When the hatch opens, can you step outside? You find that out in training, not on site — which is why the rescue scenario in GWO training is a good test.
• Being able to work with your hands. Having held a spanner, torqued a bolt, taken something apart and put it back. The colleagues who came from automotive, from agricultural machinery, from the shipyards, adapted to site fastest.
• Being able to read technical English. Service manual, fault code description, manufacturer bulletin — all in English. If you understand “replace the pitch battery pack” without a dictionary, that is enough.

Who this job is not for

To be honest about it, I have told a few people not to do this work. Who:

• Anyone who panics at height. It is not a question of courage, it is physiology. A person who panics during a rescue puts the crew at risk, not just themselves.
• Anyone who cannot be away from home. During the erection season you are on site for weeks; even on the service side there are shifts and call-outs.
• Anyone with back, knee or cardiac problems. The medical will screen this out anyway, but it does not end well for someone who gets through by arranging the paperwork.
• Anyone who thinks procedure is red tape. Not applying LOTO in this trade is like carrying a weapon with the safety off in a crowd. People with no patience for rules do not stay.

On age. This is the second most common question I get. I have seen people start at 19 and I have seen someone climb a tower for the first time at 45. What decides it is not age but the medical certificate and the willingness to learn. But let me say this: if you are starting over 35, aim for the service or commissioning side rather than erection — the body takes less punishment and your experience counts for more.

Mine was a two-year degree in automotive mechanical technology. The people working beside me came from electrical, electromechanical, mechanical and mechatronics backgrounds. Some came with none of those, out of the shipbuilding industry or industrial maintenance. So there is no single door — but some doors are wider.

Is a full degree essential

No. But let me be clear: a degree pays off not when you get your first job, but in your eighth year. If you want to move into site management, commissioning responsibility, or a technical office role on the manufacturer side, the diploma gets asked for. If you are thinking of staying in the field, a two-year degree is more than enough.

Is it worth studying wind or renewable energy engineering

I have a few friends who graduated from those programmes. The ones who joined a site as technicians did not progress faster than anyone else — because in the first year everyone does the same work: lubrication, bolt checks, cleaning, moving material. The gap opens after the third year. Do not choose a programme just because it has “wind” in the name; study electrical or mechanical, take your GWO, and you arrive at the same place with more industries open to you.

The order matters. There is no point taking the training without the medical, and no point applying without the training.

1. Medical certificate for working at height. Balance, cardiac health, blood pressure and general fitness are checked. Some centres also ask about a history of epilepsy and vertigo. An occupational physician or an authorised health provider issues this; you also fill in a health declaration when you register for GWO training.
2. GWO Basic Safety Training (BST). Working at heights and rescue (2 days), first aid (1 day), fire awareness (half a day), manual handling (half a day) — four days in total. Valid for two years. If you are going offshore, the Sea Survival module is added. I have gone through it module by module on the GWO page.
3. A driving licence. All but mandatory. You usually get yourself around the site; distances between turbines are measured in kilometres and you need to be able to drive a track road.
4. Statutory safety training. Most countries require occupational health and safety training that the employer must provide — in Turkey that is under law no. 6331. It does not replace GWO: GWO is the international industry standard, this is a legal requirement. Both are asked for separately.
5. Passport, and any national service obligations completed. If you are going to go on overseas projects, get the passport now: when an offer for a European installation project arrives you may be asked to travel within two weeks. That happened to me.

Places that sell certificates and places that deliver training are not the same thing. A piece of paper from somewhere that hands out a “working at heights” certificate in a day will not help you at the tower base. Check for yourself whether a centre is genuinely GWO accredited: I have written how to verify it.

If you have nothing today, you can be on site within a year. This timetable is realistic; plenty of people want to shorten it, but the certificate queue and the erection season will wait for you.

• Month 1 — the medical, and an honest self-assessment. Get the certificate. If you cannot, stop here — getting the bad news a year later is more expensive. In the same month, find a chance to climb a tower mock-up and test how you feel about height.
• Months 2–3 — start applying without the GWO. Yes, without the certificate. Write to manufacturer service organisations and installation contractors, and ask plainly whether the company covers GWO training. Some do; that one question can earn you the equivalent of a month’s salary. If no clear answer comes within a month, do not wait — buy the certificate yourself, but buy it deliberately: BST only, from an accredited centre, and then use it as leverage in the interview.
• Months 3–4 — close the technical English gap. Do not go to a general English course. Find a turbine service manual and read it with a dictionary. Two months later you will understand fault code descriptions without translation. The 148 terms in the glossary exist for exactly this.
• Months 4–5 — take the GWO BST. If the company will not cover it, pay yourself — but only after verifying the centre is accredited. After the course check your WINDA record; if your certificate does not appear there, the paper counts for nothing.
• Months 5–6 — write the CV like a technician. I have put a bad and a good example side by side below. Put the certificates and their expiry dates at the top; it is the first thing the person hiring looks at.
• Months 6–9 — catch the erection season. Construction projects hire in batches between spring and autumn. In that window, getting onto an installation crew is noticeably easier than getting into a service team. That is how I got in too.
• Months 9–12 — your first quarter on site: ask questions. You will be given cleaning, lubrication, bolt checks and moving material first. The people who look down on that work do not progress. While you are changing oil, ask how the gearbox works; while you are applying torque, ask why that value was specified.

The one way to shorten this timetable. Land on an installation contractor’s batch hiring at the start of the season. In that period companies will arrange the certificate themselves and have you on site within two weeks. Do not miss the start of the season.

There are two kinds of employer and they offer very different lives.

• The manufacturer’s service organisation. The in-house service teams of Enercon, Nordex, Vestas, Siemens Gamesa and the like. More corporate, there is a training budget, the equipment is decent, procedure is settled. Harder to get into, longer process. In the long run this is what carries your CV.
• Contractor or independent service company. Firms serving the wind farm owner. They get you work faster, you are on site sooner, you see more brands. In return you wear out faster and drive further. If you are starting out, start wherever you can get in — you can be choosy two years later.

Concretely, where to write

• The manufacturers’ own career pages. They post there before the advert reaches the job boards. Look once a week.
• The energy companies that own the sites. Most companies with a wind portfolio are growing their own maintenance teams.
• Installation contractors. They hire through people already on the crew, without advertising. So follow people who actually work on site on LinkedIn, and genuinely talk to them.
• Tower and blade manufacturers. There are production facilities near the ports and industrial zones; I know many people who moved from there onto site.

One conversation beats fifty applications. Most people who get onto site do so not through an advert but because someone they know said “we are looking for a new guy.” This is not favouritism: the crew wants to know the person who will be standing next to them at the tower base. Start talking to people in the industry — you can write to me too.

The person hiring is a technician. They look at a CV for thirty seconds and they are looking for one thing: what has this person actually done on site? “Works well in a team” tells them nothing.

Do not write it like this:

“I am a disciplined technician, open to learning and a good team player. I want to build a career in the energy sector. I have experience in maintenance and repair.”

Write it like this:

“Scheduled maintenance on Nordex N117 and Vestas V112 turbines. Hydraulic tensioning on blade bolts (torque value verification and reporting), pitch battery pack replacement, generator slip ring cleaning. GWO BST — valid to 03/2028.”

What to write when you have no site experience

I get this question a lot. The answer: whatever you have done that resembles site work. If you used a torque wrench in a car workshop, write it. If you repaired agricultural machinery, write it. If you maintained generators during military service, write it. The jobs you think are “unrelated” are proof of hand skills to the technician reading it.

• Certificates at the top, with expiry dates. If you have a WINDA ID, write that too — it shows you are taken seriously.
• Name the brand and the model. Not “wind turbine maintenance” but “N117 Delta”. Both the recruitment software searching and the technician reading catch on the model name.
• Give numbers. How many turbines, how many sites, how many months. “I have worked on 300+ turbines” tells ten years in one sentence.
• Licence, passport and availability in one line at the bottom. Answered before it is asked.
• Do not go past two pages. Nobody from the field reads a third page.

A technician interview has two halves: technical knowledge and safety instinct. The second decides it — they can teach you the technical knowledge, they cannot teach you the instinct.

“Are you afraid of heights?”

The right answer is not “no”. The right answer is: “I respect it, and I follow the procedure.” They are wary of the candidate who says they feel nothing; the careful person on site is the one who takes precautions.

“What would you do if you had to climb the tower alone?”

This is a trap question. The answer: I would not climb. Lone working procedures are clear, and a rescue cannot be performed by one person. A candidate who says “I would go up, I would manage” has just been eliminated.

“What is LOTO and why is it done?”

Locking and tagging out the energy. The key being in your pocket means nobody can energise that system until you come back. Answer this not from memory but by explaining the reason: while you are working inside the nacelle, the rotor starting to turn is fatal.

“What is the difference between torque and tensioning?”

Torque is tightening by turning the bolt; tensioning is stretching the bolt hydraulically and seating the nut into the gap. Tensioning is preferred on large flange connections because it removes the uncertainty caused by friction and makes the preload more repeatable.

“You see an alarm. What do you do?”

Give them the order: read the code, check its history (first time or repeat), go to the manufacturer documentation, bring the machine to a safe state, then intervene. “I would reset it straight away” is a bad answer — resetting without looking at the root cause makes the fault bigger. I have built that logic step by step in the fault tree.

“Are you suited to shifts and long periods on site?”

This is a sincerity question. If you have family circumstances or a constraint, say it now. A constraint that surfaces in the third month leaves both you and the crew in a difficult position.

The questions you should be asking

• How many of us in the crew, and how many turbines do we cover? (It shows the workload.)
• Who pays for GWO training and the refresher?
• How are travel, accommodation and meals covered?
• Is this figure gross, and does it include the site allowance? I have set out how to read an offer properly on the pay page.
• Which training will I get in the first six months?

Let us set the expectation at the start: nobody lets you solve a fault in your first year.

• First three months. Cleaning, lubrication, bolt checks, moving material, keeping the tower tidy. I have seen dozens of people who looked down on this work and did not progress. The real work of this period is asking questions.
• 3–6 months. You start taking independent items on the scheduled maintenance list. The torque wrench is in your hand, but you still have the values checked. This is when you are first left alone in the nacelle.
• 6–12 months. You go out to faults with the crew, take measurements, write the report yourself. The first of the brand training courses comes in this period. By the end of the year the question “which way am I going” appears.
• The physical reality. Your muscles ache the first month, your hands harden, the ladder gets easier in the second week. Protect your back the way they taught you in the manual handling module — in this trade the back goes early.

The choice in your second year

After two or three years you drift one way: electrical faults, major component exchange, blades, commissioning or site supervision. Choose knowing this: there are few technicians who can do both mechanical and electrical work, and whoever knows both has noticeably more bargaining power. That is why I never let go of either.

1. Buying the certificate without asking. The mistake is not buying it — it is buying it without asking. There are companies that cover it, and that one question can leave serious money in your pocket. If you still decide to pay yourself afterwards, it is not a loss: being able to start on site immediately puts you ahead in the interview.
2. Training at a centre that is not accredited. The centre chosen because it was cheap hands you a paper that never appears in WINDA. The money and the time both go. Verification is a three-minute job.
3. Missing the erection season. Applying in November and concluding that “nobody replies.” The batch hiring is in spring.
4. Going to a general English course. What you need is not conversation, it is reading a service document. Read the manual directly.
5. Looking down on the first year. Whoever says “I did not come here to lubricate” has just turned the person who would teach them fault finding against them.
6. Reading an offer from the base salary. A comparison made without counting travel, accommodation, meals and site allowance gives the wrong answer. Try the offer reader.