Electrical Lineworker Apprentice Hub
Electrical lineworkers (also called linesworkers, line workers or powerline workers) build, maintain and repair the poles, wires, transformers and street lights that carry electricity from substations to homes and businesses. It is a different trade from an electrician. A sparky works on the customer side of the connection point, inside buildings. A lineworker works on the network side: overhead lines, pole substations, service lines and, in some roles, underground cable. Most of the work is outdoors, at height from an elevated work platform (EWP) or a ladder on a pole, and close to conductors that can kill you if the controls fail. That is why it is one of the most rule-bound trades in the country.
The apprenticeship is the Certificate III in ESI - Distribution Overhead (UET30621), nominally four years. Almost every apprentice is employed directly by a network business such as Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy, Essential Energy, Energex and Ergon (Energy Queensland), Western Power, SA Power Networks, CitiPower and Powercor, TasNetworks, Evoenergy or Power and Water, or by one of the contractors that build and maintain networks for them. Intakes run once a year with online aptitude tests, interviews, a practical heights test and a pre-employment medical, so you have to apply in the window or wait another year. Demand is strong: Jobs and Skills Australia rates Electrical Linesworker as in shortage nationally and in every state and territory on the 2025 Occupation Shortage List.
Thinking about it?
Thinking about getting into Electrical Lineworker?
How to get in with no experience
You do not need any industry experience, but you do need to get through a competitive yearly intake. Pick the network businesses and line contractors in your area, register for their apprenticeship alerts and diarise the application windows, which are usually mid-year for a start the following January or February. Get your car licence, keep your maths up (Year 11 or 12 maths is what most employers look at) and get fit enough to climb a ladder and work at height in full gear. A Certificate II in Electrotechnology (Career Start), now UEE22025, is looked on favourably by several networks, and a construction white card, a first aid course or work on a farm, in civil construction or in tree work all show you can handle outdoor physical work. Then practise numerical and mechanical reasoning tests before you apply, because that is where many applicants fall over.
Who it suits
It suits people who like being outside, working in a tight crew, solving physical problems and following procedures to the letter. You need a decent head for heights, good fitness, steady nerves and the discipline to stop a job when something does not look right. You also need to be fine with early starts, being on call, getting sent to storm jobs at short notice and, in regional areas, driving long distances. It does not suit you if you are scared of heights, want to work alone, bristle at rules and paperwork, or need to be home at the same time every night. If you mainly want to wire houses or run your own small electrical business, an electrician apprenticeship is the better fit.
What you can earn
Jobs and Skills Australia does not publish a median earnings figure for Electrical Linesworkers on their own (ANZSCO 342211), because the survey sample is too small. The closest official figure is for the wider group Electrical Distribution Trades Workers (ANZSCO 3422), which covers linesworkers and technical cable jointers: median full-time earnings of $2,731 a week before tax, or about $71 an hour, as at the May 2025 ABS Survey of Employee Earnings and Hours. That is well above the all-occupations median of $1,852 a week. What moves it: enterprise agreements at the network businesses set most pay, overtime and call-outs during storms and faults add a lot, live line and switching authorisations move you up the classification structure, transmission and remote project work pays travel and living away allowances, and running a contracting business (for example as a NSW Level 1 ASP) is a different game again. JSA is moving its profiles to the new OSCA classification, so check the live figure before you rely on it.
Job outlook
Demand is strong and likely to stay that way. On the 2025 Occupation Shortage List, Electrical Linesworker / Electrical Line Mechanic (ANZSCO 342211) is rated in shortage nationally and in every state and territory, and its OSCA replacement, Electrical Distribution Trades Worker (381131), is also in shortage. Employment in the wider Electrical Distribution Trades Workers group was about 12,000 in February 2026, up around 600 on a year earlier. The drivers are an ageing workforce, more frequent storms and bushfires, the rollout of rooftop solar, batteries and electric vehicles that load up local networks, and the large transmission builds connecting new wind and solar farms. The work cannot be offshored and is hard to automate, though drones and remote inspection are changing how lines are checked.
Earnings and outlook are a guide only and change over time. Sources: Jobs and Skills Australia: Electrical Distribution Trades Workers (ANZSCO 3422) (opens in a new tab), Jobs and Skills Australia: Electrical Linesworkers (ANZSCO 342211) (opens in a new tab), Jobs and Skills Australia: Occupation Shortage List (opens in a new tab), Your Career: Electrical Linesworker (opens in a new tab), training.gov.au: UEE22025 Certificate II in Electrotechnology (Career Start) (opens in a new tab), NSW Climate and Energy Action: Accredited Service Provider (ASP) Scheme (opens in a new tab)
Start with these
What apprentices actually do
- •Install, replace and maintain poles, crossarms, insulators and hardware
- •String, tension, join and terminate overhead conductors
- •Install and maintain pole-mounted transformers, fuses, switches and other apparatus
- •Connect and maintain low voltage overhead services to customer premises
- •Respond to faults, outages and storm damage, often outside normal hours
- •Inspect the network and carry out switching to a given schedule once trained and authorised
- •Install and maintain public lighting, and in some roles work on energised low voltage lines under strict live work procedures
Same trade, different worlds
Same trade, very different day depending on the kind of work your employer does.
Urban and suburban distribution networks
Working out of a metro depot for a network business or its contractors, keeping the street network running. Lots of planned work, new estates and customer connections, plus faults.
- •Pole replacements, crossarm and insulator changes, conductor upgrades and service lines to houses
- •Heavy use of EWPs and crane borers on busy roads, so traffic management is part of every job
- •Nine-day fortnights and rostered days off are common under enterprise agreements
- •On-call rosters for faults once you are qualified, usually one week in several
Regional and rural networks
Covering huge areas of farmland, bush and coast from a country depot. Long drives, older lines and more storm and bushfire damage to repair.
- •Single wire earth return (SWER) lines, long spans and poles in paddocks you have to walk or four-wheel drive to
- •More pole climbing by ladder where a truck cannot get in
- •Storm, flood and bushfire restoration that can mean days away and long shifts
- •Interstate mutual aid crews get sent to help after major disasters
Transmission, rail and construction contractors
Building and maintaining the high voltage backbone, rail traction lines and new connections for wind and solar farms. Usually a separate qualification and more travel.
- •Transmission work uses towers and much higher voltages, under the Certificate III in ESI - Transmission Overhead (UET30521)
- •Rail traction lineworkers keep overhead wiring for trains and trams running (UET30721)
- •Project work often means fly in fly out or living away for weeks
- •Contractors may be covered by a different award or their own enterprise agreement, so check your paperwork
A day in the life (first year)
- ▹Around 6.30 to 7am: sign in at the depot, prestart meeting and toolbox talk on the day's hazards, permits and switching
- ▹Check and load the truck: hardware, conductor, earths, rescue kit and your own gear, then drive to site, sometimes an hour or more in the country
- ▹Set up the site: traffic control, exclusion zones, test before you touch and fit earths under the supervision of the qualified crew
- ▹First-year work is mostly ground hand: digging, framing up crossarms on the ground, passing gear up on a hand line, rigging and dogging under supervision
- ▹Smoko and lunch wherever the job is, then back into it, often in full sun, rain or wind
- ▹Pack up, clean up the site, head back to the depot, restock the truck, finish paperwork and knock off around 3.30 to 4pm, unless a fault keeps the crew out
First-year expectations
- →Getting in is the hard part: yearly intakes, aptitude tests, a heights assessment and a medical, and many applicants for few spots
- →You start on the ground. Digging, carrying, rigging, traffic and keeping the truck stocked come long before you work near anything live
- →You will do a lot of time at the employer's training centre or TAFE in blocks, learning circuit theory as well as practical pole yard skills
- →Your high risk work licences (dogging and boom-type EWP) are part of the course, and you generally need to be 18 to be issued them
- →The rules are strict and you will be pulled up for small things. That is the culture that keeps people alive, not someone picking on you
- →Expect weather, early starts, long drives and tiredness, and expect the money and conditions to be good compared with many trades, especially once you are 21 or older
Tools you'll need
Common terms
- LV and HV
- Low voltage (the 230 and 400 volt mains in your street) and high voltage (the distribution lines above it, commonly 11,000 volts or more). Different rules apply to each.
- EWP
- Elevated work platform. The truck-mounted bucket or basket most overhead work is done from. You need a high risk work licence for booms of 11 metres or more.
- Access permit
- The written authority that says a piece of network has been isolated, tested and earthed and is safe to work on. No permit, no work.
- Earthing
- Fitting portable earths to isolated conductors so that if they are accidentally re-energised, the fault goes to ground rather than through you.
- Minimum approach distance
- The closest you, your tools or your plant can get to an energised conductor of a given voltage without being specially authorised for live work.
- Live line work
- Working on conductors while they stay energised, using glove and barrier or stick methods. It is specialist work done by trained and authorised crews, not by first-year apprentices.
- Switching program
- The step-by-step written schedule for opening and closing switches and fuses to isolate or restore part of the network.
- SWER
- Single wire earth return. A cheap single-conductor line used across rural Australia that uses the earth as the return path.
- Service line
- The cable that runs from the street network to the connection point on a house or building. Past that point it is an electrician's territory.
- Pole top rescue
- The emergency procedure for getting an injured or unconscious worker down from a pole or EWP. You practise it regularly.
TAFE & study support
The qualification is the Certificate III in ESI - Distribution Overhead (UET30621), current on training.gov.au at Release 3 (August 2025). It replaced UET30619 (Certificate III in ESI - Power Systems - Distribution Overhead), which replaced UET30612, so older tradies may still call it Power Systems. It is 24 units: 20 core plus 4 electives, and the core includes the dogging licence, the boom-type EWP licence and chainsaw units as well as electrical theory and overhead line work. Unlike most trades, much of the off-the-job training is delivered by the network businesses themselves through their own registered training organisations, such as Ergon Energy, Western Power's Power Training Services, SA Power Networks, TasNetworks, Endeavour Energy and Essential Energy, or by TAFE NSW, Holmesglen and Chisholm in Victoria and a handful of industry RTOs. Training is mostly done in blocks at a training centre with a pole yard rather than one day a week, and the award requires your employer to cover the extra travel and accommodation costs when block release means staying overnight.
Licensing & qualifications
Finishing the Cert III does not make you an electrician, and you will not get an unrestricted electrical licence from it. What you get is a set of tickets plus the right to be authorised by the network. The course itself includes high risk work licences for dogging and boom-type EWPs (11 metres or more), issued by your state WHS regulator. On top of that, every network business runs its own safety rules and authorises you for specific work, such as access permits, switching or live LV work, as you are trained. State rules differ. In Victoria you need an Energy Safe Victoria Lineworker's licence, class D for distribution, which requires a four-year training contract including at least 12 months of class D linework and the UET30621 (or the older Power Systems) qualification. Queensland has an electrical linesperson licence through the Electrical Safety Office under the Electrical Safety Regulation 2026. In NSW, workers must be authorised by the local network operator, and contractors doing contestable network work need Accredited Service Provider (ASP) Level 1 accreditation, where Class 1A overhead work requires UET30621 (or UET30612) plus a unit on testing connections. In South Australia, SA Power Networks says its powerline apprentices receive a restricted electrical worker's licence on completion. In WA, Tasmania, the ACT and the NT, check with your employer and the electrical regulator what licence or authorisation applies.
What you'll get paid
The national award for network businesses is the Electrical Power Industry Award 2020 (MA000088). It sets apprentice pay as a percentage of the Pay Level 3 standard rate, with separate, higher percentages for adult apprentices (21 or older when the training contract starts), and a qualified lines or cable person sits at Technical Grade 3. It also has allowances that matter in this trade, including a transmission allowance for work on power lines, an availability allowance for on-call rosters, minimum payments for emergency call-outs and paid travel expenses. In practice most lineworker apprentices are not paid the award. The big network businesses pay under enterprise agreements that sit well above it, often with a nine-day fortnight and extra leave, and some publish their apprentice rates on their careers pages. The award also excludes employers bound by their own enterprise instruments and contractors covered by the Electrical, Electronic and Communications Contracting Award (MA000025), so a contractor apprentice may be on a different award altogether. Ask which award or agreement covers you before you sign, then use the Fair Work Pay Calculator for award minimums. We do not publish apprentice dollar figures because they change every July.
Common questions
Is a lineworker the same as an electrician?
No. Electricians work on installations inside buildings, on the customer side of the connection point. Lineworkers work on the poles, wires and transformers of the network. The qualifications, licences and employers are different, and a lineworker Cert III does not give you an electrician's licence.
Who actually hires lineworker apprentices?
Mostly the network businesses: Ausgrid, Endeavour Energy and Essential Energy in NSW, Energex and Ergon in Queensland, CitiPower and Powercor in Victoria, SA Power Networks, Western Power, TasNetworks, Evoenergy in the ACT and Power and Water in the NT, plus the contractors who build and maintain lines for them.
When do applications open?
Once a year, and the window can be as short as two weeks. Most networks recruit around the middle of the year for a start the following January or February, though SA Power Networks expects to recruit for its mid-2027 intake from January 2027. Register your interest with every network near you so you get the email when it opens.
What is the selection process like?
Typically an online application, online aptitude tests covering numerical and mechanical reasoning, a video or face-to-face interview, a practical assessment that includes working at heights or climbing a pole by ladder, then reference, police, licence and medical checks, often including drug and alcohol testing.
Do I need to finish Year 12?
It depends on the employer. SA Power Networks asks for Year 11, Powercor wants Year 11 General Maths or a Cert II in Electrotechnology, and TasNetworks looks for Year 12 with maths and English, a pre-vocational course or relevant work experience. Good maths helps everywhere.
Do I need a driver's licence?
Yes, almost always. Network businesses ask for a current car licence, full or provisional, before you start, and some want a clean driving history report. You will drive work vehicles, and you will often be put through a truck licence during your apprenticeship.
Can a qualified electrician become a lineworker?
Yes. Some networks run accelerated programs for qualified electricians, such as SA Power Networks' Powerline for Electricians program, and others recognise prior learning for the shared electrical theory units. Being dual trade is valued, especially in regional depots.
Safety reminders
- ⚠Electrocution and flashover from contact with, or getting too close to, energised conductors. Approach distances, isolation, testing and earthing exist because the network does not give second chances
- ⚠Unexpected re-energisation, including back-feed from generators and rooftop solar, which is why you test before you touch and earth every isolated line
- ⚠Falls from poles, ladders and EWPs, and EWP incidents such as tip-overs or contact with overhead lines, managed with harnesses, rescue drills and controlled descent training
- ⚠Arc flash burns when switching or working on LV gear, which is why arc-rated clothing, face shields and insulated gloves are issued and tested
- ⚠Storm and fault work: fallen lines, damaged poles, unstable trees and chainsaw work, often at night and in bad weather when fatigue is high
- ⚠Traffic, heat, sun and long-distance driving. Being hit by a car while working on the road and fatigue on the drive home are real risks in this trade
Sources and official links
Straight from the source. These open in a new tab.
- training.gov.au: UET30621 Certificate III in ESI - Distribution Overhead (opens in a new tab)
- Fair Work Commission: Electrical Power Industry Award 2020 (MA000088) (opens in a new tab)
- Fair Work Ombudsman: Pay Calculator (opens in a new tab)
- Jobs and Skills Australia: Electrical Linesworkers (ANZSCO 342211) (opens in a new tab)
- Jobs and Skills Australia: Occupation Shortage List (opens in a new tab)
- Energy Safe Victoria: Lineworker's licence (opens in a new tab)
- WorkSafe Queensland: Classes of electrical licences (opens in a new tab)
- NSW Climate and Energy Action: Level 1 ASP qualification and training requirements (opens in a new tab)
- Safe Work Australia: Model Code of Practice, Managing electrical risks in the workplace (opens in a new tab)
- SA Power Networks: Apprenticeship Program (opens in a new tab)
- CitiPower and Powercor: Apprenticeships (opens in a new tab)
- TasNetworks: Apprentice Program (opens in a new tab)
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