The electrician who teaches people how to get in — and built the app to prove it.

I'm Michael — a 13-year IBEW Local 134 journeyman. I started in this trade at 18, made foreman as a 3rd-year apprentice, and today I teach a federally recognized pre-apprenticeship on the south side of Chicago. I've helped 100+ students get into the IBEW. Sparky AI is everything I teach them, in your pocket.

From an 18-Year-Old Apprentice to Foreman in Three Years

I didn’t take the long way in. Right out of high school, at 18, I got into the IBEW and went straight to work. I put my head down, learned the trade cold, and by my third year as an apprentice I was running crews as a foreman — a spot most people don’t see until well into their journeyman years.

Thirteen years later, I’m a Local 134 journeyman and a licensed electrical contractor — but I’ve also added something most electricians never do: a teaching license. I’m a credentialed Illinois educator, OSHA 30 certified, and I hold my EPA 608 Universal certification. The trade taught me the work. Teaching taught me how to make it stick for someone else.

Now I Get People Into the Trade I Love

For the last several years I’ve taught a federally recognized pre-apprenticeship program on the south side of Chicago. My whole job is taking people who want a shot at the IBEW and getting them ready to actually earn it — the aptitude test, the interview, the math, the work ethic, all of it.

That’s the difference you feel in this app. Sparky AI isn’t prep written by a marketing team. It’s built around the exact things I drill with my students every week — the real NJATC test format, honest feedback on your weak spots, and NEC answers that cite the actual code article so you can trust them on the job.

The Credentials Behind It

Why I Built Sparky AI

My students always asked the same thing: “Is there one place I can study all of this?” There wasn’t. Aptitude prep lived in one book, NEC answers in another, the calculators in a third — and the AI tools they tried would hand back confident, wrong code answers that would fail an inspection in the real world.

So I built the tool I wished I could hand every one of them: accurate NEC answers that cite the actual article, full IBEW aptitude prep in the real test format, and the calculators of the trade — all in one app. The same person who answers your questions about the trade is the one behind the app.

By the Numbers