MEET VERDIA MAYS
Age: 46
Hometown: Pine Bluff
Apprenticeship: Highland Pellets
MY BACK STORY
I grew up in Pine Bluff, and I’ve been here all my life. I love it. I’m the next to the youngest of five children, and my two brothers and two sisters and I had a wonderful childhood. We were lucky enough to have great parents, who really emphasized education. Mother is a nurse, and our dad, who is gone now, was a long-distance trucker. Mother started emphasizing education really early. She would have these books that she would teach us, and we learned to read and write before we even got to school. “Go to school, get your education,” she would say. “Education is the most important thing that you could possibly do. It’ll get you so many places in life.”
Of course, I didn’t know what places in life I wanted to go to. I remember when I was a little girl watching TV, there was this Tulsa welding commercial that used to come on TV all the time, and I was fascinated by it. And I thought, Oh my God, I want to do that. I don’t know if it was just the fire, being able to create something using fire with your hands, but I found welding really fascinating.
After high school, I worked to support myself, then got married and worked to help support my husband and me. But while I took years off from my education, I’ve ultimately stayed with it. I eventually even got my certification as a welder.
MY WORK LIFE (Part One)
One of my first good jobs after high school was at PPG Industries in Little Rock. PPG is a global supplier of paints and coatings, and at first I cleaned, lubricated, and performed maintenance on various machines. Eventually, I became a Paint Production Specialist—making the paint. I mixed batches of paint, using all the raw materials, including a lot of dangerous chemicals. I worked at PPG for about two years, from October 2010 to February 2012.
MY WORK LIFE (Part Two)
My next job was back in Pine Bluff at Central Moloney, the big manufacturer of power transformers. There I was a “6A Painter,” which meant I painted the transformer units using a powder-coat paint gun, which was amazing. That was a really fun job, I guess because it was a skill, an art. There’s a lot involved in doing that—you have to manage the coating thickness, and of course you have to ensure that all the equipment is clean and working properly. I was at Central Moloney from February 2012 to July of 2017.
MY WORK LIFE (Part Three)
Back to Little Rock, this time at Ermco, which stands for Electric Research and Manufacturing Cooperative. Ermco provides services, maintenance, and various transformer innovations for power grids. My job there was Coil Winder. The transformer units where we receive our electricity from have all this wire inside, and I was one of the people who coiled that wire to make it fit.
Believe me, that took skill. It’s not a job you’re going to master overnight. You’ll train for about six to eight months just to learn it. It’s dangerous too, because you have machines that are moving at a really fast pace while you’re winding this wire on this coil, and it can grab your clothes, or grab your hand. You could lose a finger if you don’t watch out.
I was at Ermco from July 2017 to July 2020, when I was laid off because of COVID. And after all these years of working shifts, I took this layoff and this down time as an opportunity to do what my mother always said—continue my schooling.
MY EDUCATION (Part One)
Southeast Arkansas College is a public community college in Pine Bluff, and in 2020 I enrolled and started working toward a degree. In May 2022, I received my Associate of Applied Science degree in General Technology, with a GPA of 3.84.
MY EDUCATION (Part Two)
After getting my Associate’s Degree, I entered the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff with the aim of getting my Bachelor’s Degree. This has been a work in progress, and it still is. I’m in school and I’m working a job at the same time, and it’s a hard process. But this May—May of 2026—I’m on track to receive my Bachelor of Science in Industrial Technology Management & Applied Engineering.
I’ve learned all about estimated scheduling and other aspects of management, plus a whole lot about fluid power systems and digital electronics, diving deeper and deeper into the electrical field. I have to say, this is an amazing career focus.
MY TURNAROUND MOMENT
Going to school and working at the same time is hard, but so is going to school and not having a job! That’s the situation I was in last summer, and it was then that I saw a job posting from Apprenticely. So I applied for that, and soon Apprenticely’s Jenny Sales reached out to me and said that position had already been filled. “But I have another one,” she said, “—control room operator at Highland Pellets in Pine Bluff.”
Once I read the job description, I thought, Oh, this would be nice. Because although I took programmable logic controls in college, and liked it a lot, I had never really worked with them. So I uploaded my resumé for Ms. Sales and told her I was interested, and after that, everything happened really fast. In no time, she had me set up for an interview, and here we are. I’ve now been in my apprenticeship for about six months. From what I’ve been told, it could take anywhere from a year to three years to complete. Meanwhile, I love the work.
MY APPRENTICESHIP
Highland Pellets creates wooden pellets that are used to create energy. These pellets are shipped to Europe and other places in the world where they need more energy. I think it’s an amazing process, and I’ll be really glad when we get something like that here in the U.S. I have a lot of power outages in my area—I have no idea why—but I could use these pellets for warmth and even light during a winter power outage.
Anyway, my typical day involves monitoring the plant. The pellets are run on four different production lines, and I monitor two of those lines and another operator monitors the other two. We are monitoring every process that takes place out there, from the start-up, to how the feed comes down that conveyor, to when it goes into the ovens, to when it dries, to the temperatures at which it dries. All of this has to be carefully monitored to make sure everything is running right and nothing is malfunctioning in any way, such as getting jammed. We watch this on our monitors. If anything happens, we’re able to stop the line and get an electrician, a maintenance person, somebody to get out there to take care of that issue.
There are 10 people who work in our department, and, as you might imagine, I’m the only female.
MY CAREER GOAL
Highland Pellets is a really wonderful place to work. I admire everything they’re doing around the world. My goal? I would really love a permanent position there, because I love what I do. I can’t really explain it any other way. I just love it.
And what about my first love, welding? I have a welder at home, and welding’s now a hobby.
For more on Verdia Mays and Highland Pellets, click this link.