Don Jennings Retires After 17 Years at NIPCO

Celebrating a career fueled by passion for tech and a lifelong love of learning.

Don Jennings visits with NIPCO's Marc Scheitler in the Control Room. (2012)

After nearly 17 years of dedicated service, NIPCO’s Senior SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) Technician, Don Jennings, is preparing to retire from NIPCO to pursue the passions that have guided his life both on and off the job.

Don Jennings, 2009.

Don’s path to NIPCO began through a fellow HAM Radio operator in 2009. After nine years as a 911 dispatcher for Plymouth County, fellow operator and NIPCO Vice President of Telecommunication Services Denny Hill encouraged him to apply for an open position at the electric generation and transmission power cooperative. Though he didn’t land that first job, the HR administrator saw Don’s potential and kept his resume on file, suggesting a more suitable position might be coming soon. One year later, that opportunity arrived when Don applied for and was hired as a Control Center Operator in August 2009.

Don’s first day was overwhelming, but his dispatcher experience—making quick decisions under pressure, finding solutions rapidly, and communicating effectively over the radio—served him well in his new role. The skills he’d honed through his HAM radio experience and his work responding to emergencies at the 911 Call Center translated seamlessly into navigating operations in NIPCO’s control center. A handful of years later, NIPCO created a new SCADA technician position that perfectly matched Don’s lifelong passion for electronics and technology. He applied and was placed in the new role.

Don notes that, as a boy, he had always been interested in how things work, and that passion was further fueled when, around age 30, his wife asked what he wanted for Christmas. After flipping through a JCPenney catalogue, he settled on a HAM radio—a gift that would shape his hobbies and career for decades to come. His love for building and tinkering grew from there. “It’s what I do for fun at home,” he says about building microprocessors and working with electronics. This hobby proved invaluable professionally—Don developed programs for repeaters that he would later use in his SCADA technician role, demonstrating how his personal interests perfectly complemented his career path. In fact, Don joked with a co-worker early in his career at NIPCO, “You mean I get paid to do this?”

Don Jennings sits at his workstation in NIPCO's SCADA office. (2026)

Don’s commitment to learning extends far beyond work. He mastered Morse Code, a skill necessary to earn more HAM radio privileges, eventually translating up to 13 words per minute. In addition, Don earned his pilot’s license and developed serious photography skills while enjoying the beauty of the outdoors while fishing. He even designs and constructs custom frames to showcase his favorite photos and hopes to expand his knowledge in this area in retirement. “I enjoy the learning,” he explains, noting he could tell countless stories about each hobby and the adventures and friendships they’ve brought.

This spring, Don and his wife Joyce will relocate full-time to their recently purchased Lake of the Ozarks home—complete with a spacious basement workshop to contain all of Don’s projects—to be near her family and enjoy the company of “Missouri People” and the more moderate temperatures they’ve grown to love.

While Don had planned to work a couple more years, the call to a new chapter driven by his passions made retirement feel right. His parting wisdom reflects a lifetime of experience: “You have to enjoy your job and learn to roll with life’s changes. The older I get, the more I think about the saying that ‘Time becomes more valuable than money.’ I got a lot of stuff I want to do.”

NIPCO congratulates Don on his March 2 retirement and wishes him a wealth of time for continued learning and adventure.