The US Navy's NEETS course manuals are fairly easy to find online, and are high quality materials. Compared to the other services, the US Navy electronics techs are less specialized in one area, so they need broad skills. I'm guessing because you can only put so many people on a ship?

One source of their materials:

http://www.compatt.com/Tutorials/NEETS/NEETS.html

Militaries probably also need broad skills redundancy among their people, for obvious reasons.

I'm saying the Navy Electronics techs are less specialized than the Army or Air Force.

Maybe because such specialists are harder to replace out on the ocean during hostilities, so they need more skill redundancy among ship crew.

Right...that you can only fit so many people on a ship :)

I’ve been watching the associated YouTube channel for a while, not realizing there was a structured program behind it. It is a top notch set of video lectures. Very thorough.

I like the aesthetic of the page and understand they are "talking their book"... but I have to wonder if there is any merit to the claims they state on the web page: "Today, the last generation of technicians is retiring faster than the next is being trained to replace them. ETA International reports that there is a critical shortage of electronics technicians. Universities educate electrical engineers but do not usually train technicians for electronics service and repair." [1]

Is there a real demand for these skills out there? What does the pay structure look like?

I assume these types of jobs would require lots of travel if you are not in a big city... or there are few opportunities if you do not live in a place with lots of industry. I have so many questions... As I near retirement from my first career, I think about doing something to stay challenged into my 50's and 60's.

[1]https://rsdacademy.net/RSDAcademyCourses.php

Not sure about the demand for technicians, but I will say that many EEs today don't really have the practical experience that a EE several decades ago would have. I know many students who have never touched a soldering iron, are afraid of working inside a computer, and would not be able to repair a basic piece of equipment. I would imagine that technician support would be needed for those engineers in the lab.

Even several decades when I was a technician most of the new EEs where I worked had very little practical experience. It was worse than them not being able to do basic repairs; their wonderful designs would usually not work and they were unable to figure out why.

Well, their jobs got moved to China anyway and they started doimg marketing, so...

Fiber optics coming soon