‘Shocked’: Local electrician named IBEW Apprentice of the Year

Last edited 3:23 p.m., Dec. 5, 2025 [Editor's note: Corrected name of organization and clarified professional title.]

A Springfield electrician has been tapped as apprentice of the year by the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers.

And the kudos for Chase Blackburn do not represent merely a local honor; the award comes from North America’s largest electrical union, whose website boasts of more than 870,000 members and retirees.

Blackburn finished his five-year apprenticeship program this year and is now a journeyman electrician.

He was nominated in a letter by a fellow apprentice, Cory O’Keefe – something that Blackburn said compounds the honor.

In a video prepared by the international IBEW about the award, O’Keefe offered high praise for his classmate.

“Whenever he’s around, the room is lighter,” O’Keefe said. “You feel more motivated; you feel excited to be there.”

An apprenticeship with IBEW Local 453 is now a four-year program, but Blackburn is one of the last apprentices who completed a five-year plan.

Local 453 Business Manager Kevin McGill said the first indication of Blackburn’s selection was a call from the international office to make sure he was worthy of the award. He said there are around 50,000 apprentices in the organization.  McGill said he gave an enthusiastic endorsement to Blackburn, who had established himself as a gifted electrician and an enthusiastic learner.

Apprentices learn the National Electrical Code book backwards and forwards, and they also build practical job experience. Most of Blackburn’s was with Horton Electric Service Co. LLC, acquired in 2023 by the Waldinger Corp. Blackburn joined Horton in November 2020 after a brief stint with United Electric Service LLC.

These days, he runs a crew doing industrial work at 3M Springfield, where he heads up his own team of apprentices and journeymen.

“They needed a change of leadership out there, and I kind of got thrown into the fire,” he said. “They’ve seen me for a few years; they know what I can take on.”

Blackburn said as a kid, he was interested in learning how things worked.

“You couldn’t leave me sitting still for too long without me tearing something apart,” he said. “All my toys were in pieces. Anything I could get my hands on, I wanted to figure out how it worked. My parents had to lock the tools up, or who knows what I would get into when I was a kid?”

He spent a year studying computer science at the University of Missouri.

“I kind of had a change of heart up there,” he said. “I don’t know if I could envision my every workday just being at a computer. I’m too busy-bodied. I have to move around.”

He reached out to some relatives who were former electricians, and they recommended the IBEW apprenticeship.

“I was looking for something that I could do where I could use my body and move around and get a change of scenery, but also use my brain,” he said.

Ironically, Blackburn said he spends about 80% of his time behind a computer in his current role.

“I always look at myself through a critical lens and dissecting myself all the time – how can I be better at this or that?” he said.

Jeb Venable, the local’s director of membership development, was a first-year journeyman when Blackburn was new to the apprenticeship program. Venable said Blackburn was the kind of apprentice who made him better at his own job.

“Whenever you’re in that situation, you’re trying to find the ghost in the machine, assess the issue,” Venable said. “Whenever Chase showed up in those situations, he knew where to be and knew what to get ready for – OK, let’s get the wire up on the spools, let’s start taking up the impact, let’s start getting the material that we’re going to need.”

Venable said Blackburn recognized what it took to be a reliable hand.

Bryan Hensley, training director, said he was involved with Blackburn since he started in the application process and got him started with a contractor.

“I put him with Horton Electric pretty quickly, probably when he was four months in, and they never let go of him,” he said.

Hensley introduced Blackburn to the profession as his first-year teacher.

“One thing that I noticed pretty quickly is that electricity made sense to Chase just naturally,” he said. “There are some people who just understand how the components work together, and that’s something you take notice of pretty quickly. He just kind of got it.”

And Hensley said he has been hands-off with Blackburn since he finished his first-year class.

“I never had to deal much with Chase because he was on the right track,” he said.

Blackburn said during his apprenticeship, he always carried a notebook in his pocket and used it to write down measurements and the materials he needed, but it had another purpose, too.

“Any time I heard a word or someone talk about something that, to me, being new to the trade, I didn’t know what it meant, I wrote it down in there – I wrote what is a solenoid, or what is a high-voltage transformer or line reactor or any of those things,” he said. “I would go home at the end of the day and I’d look up all those things that I’d written down all through the day, and I would study it.”

That confession takes some of the magic away, Blackburn said – though he adds he was fortunate to have good people around him who were willing and able to answer questions instead of just focusing on the task at hand.

“There wasn’t a question I could ask that I couldn’t get an amazing answer,” he said. “I had great mentors around me the whole time.”

Blackburn said when he learned about the award in May, he was shocked – a feeling most electrical workers studiously avoid.

He was called up to the union hall with all of the other apprentices, and they watched a video from the international office of the previous year’s apprentice of the year award presentation. Then McGill stepped up and announced that Blackburn was this year’s winner – at which point someone dumped an entire cooler full of wire nuts on his head.

“I couldn’t imagine,” he said. “I thought I did a good job, and I was trying to do better each day, but I never thought I’d receive national recognition for trying to do my best.”