- December 13, 2025
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A $12 million electrical contracting company with offices in Venice and St. Petersburg is creating its own talent pipeline to fill jobs at the growing company.
CEO Paul Sameit says when he purchased NCN Electric in 2020, the business faced a challenge.
“I felt like I was running a senior citizen organization,” Sameit says. “We just didn't have many young people who would come here and stay, because we didn't have a good training program.”
Sameit's solution? An apprenticeship program.
Several contracting firms in the region have used apprenticeship programs to help combat labor shortages. The list includes window manufacturer PGT Innovations, a subsidiary of MITER Brands; Naples-based Pro-Tec Plumbing; and AdventHealth and Ultimate Medical Academy through a partnership with CareerSource Tampa Bay and Hillsborough County Commissioners.
"Rapid population growth and economic expansion in Florida have created high demand for skilled workers in construction, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, health care, IT and advanced manufacturing," says Diane Seavers, project manager for CareerSource Suncoast in Sarasota. "Apprenticeships provide a pipeline of trained talent without relying solely on traditional college pathways."
There's another benefit to having apprentices: retention.
"Apprentices tend to stay with the employer who trained them," Seavers says. "Studies show 93% remain employed after completing their program, which helps businesses maintain workforce stability."
A serial entrepreneur, Sameit has run two companies in the aviation industry. Launching an apprenticeship program is part of a larger plan to grow NCN Electric, he says, which could include a future acquisition.
In the Florida heat especially, Sameit says, it is important to have younger workers on the team to do some of the actual heavy lifting. So he and his colleagues came up with a plan for attracting and developing talent: an apprenticeship program that would help grow its workforce by almost 50%.
Sameit credits his vice president of operations, Clayton Doing, a third-generation electrician, with being the “architect” of the school.
“He had grown up in the Northeast, and … up there, they had a lot of apprenticeship programs,” Sameit says, so he had models in mind.
NCN Electric officially launched its four-year apprenticeship program in September. Now its employee roster of 50 is supplemented by 22 more employees who are also apprentices.
The apprenticeship school is held at the company’s St. Petersburg office, a warehouse it outfitted for the purpose, with a classroom designed for students to get hands-on experience. “We can train them to our standards,” says Jodie Otteni, NCN Electric’s school and safety administrator.
The program consists of technical instruction and on-the-job training. Students complete 144 classroom hours and 2,000 hours of on-the-job training each year, according to Otteni, with the program in session from September to July.
Recent classroom labs the students participated in range from pipe bending to wiring a light to wiring a motor, she says. Students will also be trained in safety like CPR and will become forklift certified.
Currently, 22 students are enrolled in the program: 10 first-year, five second-year, five third-year and two fourth-year students, according to Otteni, who says when they graduate they will become licensed journeymen electricians.
NCN Electric has worked with CareerSource Suncoast, local chambers of commerce and trade schools in the area to spread the word about its apprenticeship program. It also received a grant from CareerEdge, a workforce development initiative within the Greater Sarasota Chamber of Commerce, and plans to apply for a grant from the Florida Department of Education, to help fund the school. Sameit and Otteni say they do not have current data on how much money they have invested in the program so far.
A big perk for students in the apprenticeship program is they get paid to work in the field and do not have to pay tuition.
“'It's a real game-changer,” Sameit says, “and it makes it very competitive.”
It's so competitive that there's a waiting list to join the school, and Otteni, in a late October interview, says the company is still getting calls from people wanting to sign up.
It can cost thousands of dollars to enroll in a trade school to become an electrician, Sameit says, and most students end up working during the day then attending classes at night.
“Some of them have young children, so [in the apprenticeship program], they get to go home with their families at the end of the day, which I think is really important,” Sameit says. “That's what I really love about our program.”
Prior to the apprenticeship program, Sameit, like many peers in his field, tried many ways to solve the labor shortage: He has used headhunting firms and temp agencies to hire people in the past, for one. But the risk there, he says, is “you don’t always know what you’re going to get.”
Training workers in-house provides a workforce that is custom-trained to NCN Electric’s needs.
“It’s a competitive advantage for us,” Sameit says.
NCN Electric, which did $12 million in revenue in 2024, primarily handles new construction and focuses on the commercial market.
“We’ve done a lot of work at the airports in Fort Myers, Punta Gorda and Sarasota,” Sameit says. The company is also working on Jaycee Park in Cape Coral and Sarasota County’s new fleet maintenance facility, among other projects.
While those in the apprenticeship program tend to be in their 20s, the rest of the workforce is more seasoned and has been in the field a number of years and can provide guidance.
“We have a lot of very experienced people, and you develop best practices,” Sameit says. With the apprenticeship program, “we make sure that everybody is learning from the best practices, which raises the whole company up.”
The plan is to continue the apprenticeship program next year with 10 more first-year apprentices. The company does not have the bandwidth to expand its capacity at the moment, with one teacher, according to Sameit.
Timothy Smith, who started in 2024 at NCN Electric as the company’s safety officer, leads the apprenticeship program as the instructor. He has more than 30 years of industry experience, including teaching electrical and safety courses at Pinellas Technical College and Hillsborough Community College since 2009.
“We want to continue to grow the company and make it better and better, and then make this a place that you can grow with and stay with,” Sameit says.
To attract and retain employees, NCN Electric offers benefits including health insurance and a matching 401(k) program open to the apprentices, Sameit says. It also provides career paths.
“There's room to grow within the company, because we have project management, assistant project managers, estimators, so there are different positions that they could aspire to,” Sameit says.
If people want to leave, that’s OK too, he adds.
“Sometimes it's good to have people as they grow also go to other companies and get experience there,” Sameit says, “and then we’d welcome them back at some point in the future.”
NCN Electric is the name the company had when Sameit bought it in 2020, and part of the agreement was that he would keep it. Since the beginning, his vision has always been to grow the company.
“When I got here, it was just kind of a ma and pa shop that, you know, they could grow up to a certain level, but they always just kind of stayed in that zone,” Sameit says. “I bought the company because I had owned two previous companies, both of which I had started from scratch, and I knew what I was looking for, which was a company that we could grow from a good, solid foundation and kind of take it up to that next level.”
The apprenticeship program, he says, is helping NCN Electric get there.
“There's other areas that we are eyeing,” Sameit says, “where we could potentially purchase another company in that area to expand the footprint even further.”
