Recently, David Gray was approached by someone who works for him in the facilities department at Middle Tennessee State University. Did you realize, the colleague asked Mr. Gray, that James Chancy was in his mid-60s and could retire at any time?
Mr. Chancy, a facilities-staff member who has been at the college for 25 years, has been involved in countless projects and seen pipes, wires, and other vital infrastructure buried in the ground or in walls all over campus. “He has knowledge about things that nobody ever sees,” says Mr. Gray, assistant vice president for facilities. “That is just one example. Most of my guys know where all the closets are on campus, and they know the peculiarities of the buildings. How do you transfer that knowledge? How do you pass that on to the next generation? It’s tough.”
Mr. Gray’s story sums up a problem for many colleges: The men and women who make the lights come on, the toilets flush, and the air conditioning work are getting older. Sometimes only those people know that an old chiller in the administration building will run better with a swift kick to its side every now and then.
Replacing idiosyncratic institutional knowledge is not easy under any circumstances. But several factors, including trends in the work force, perceptions among administrators, and even the economic downturn, have complicated their ability to attract and retain skilled labor in facilities departments.
A recent human-resources analysis at North Carolina State University indicates that some 35 percent of staff members in the facilities department will be eligible for retirement in the next five to seven years, says Jack Colby, assistant vice chancellor for facilities operations. “That fell in line with what I had been reading and picking up in discussions” with administrators from other institutions, he says.
What troubles him are the demographic trends in the trades that facilities departments draw from. Over the past several years, construction-industry analysts have fretted over the shortage of skilled-trade laborers in the American market. Electrical Construction & Maintenance, a trade magazine, has predicted that the nation will need more than 734,000 electrical workers by 2014, 78,000 more than now work in that field.
There is no telling how the recent economic crash, which drastically cut residential and commercial construction markets, will affect those numbers. But, say Mr. Colby and other facilities administrators, another long-term trend spells trouble: Young people have not been interested in careers in the trades, or have been dissuaded from going into them.
That adds challenges to a market where colleges are already operating at a disadvantage. “Typically, higher education has not had the highest-paying jobs, and we compete heavily for workers” against the more-lucrative commercial market, Mr. Colby says.
Outdated attitudes in campus-administration and university-system offices, which often set job descriptions and pay rates, do not help the situation, he says. College facilities workers are increasingly people who work with highly specialized equipment—for example, mechanics managing work orders through databases and BlackBerrys. But in academe, a stereotype persists of a guy with minimal education lugging a pipe wrench.
“There is a morale issue where people are working in an environment where people feel less than worthy,” says Maggie Kinnaman, who just retired from a 30-year career as director of business administration and support services in facilities at the University of Maryland at Baltimore. She says the university consistently struggled to hire plumbers and electricians, never mind the highly specialized workers needed for the campus elevator-repair shop.
‘Brain Dump’
Like other institutions, Loyola College in Maryland competes with the local construction market for tradesmen. Helen Schneider, associate vice president for facilities and campus services, says the college has worked with local trade schools to funnel workers to the campus. The college promotes its benefits, like free tuition there or at Roman Catholic schools, and the job stability compared with the commercial market.
Certainly that stability has led people to stay for a very long time. The three directors in the facilities department have been at Loyola for an average of 24 years. One of them, Les Pely, has been at the college for 32 years—longer if you count his time as an undergraduate. The six assistant directors have been at the college for an average of 20 years. And the majority of workers in some of the facilities units—like the one that handles campus renovations—are in their 50s or 60s.
Loyola is working on “succession plans,” Ms. Schneider says, a buzzword in the facilities world as administrators try to figure out how to pass on longtimers’ institutional knowledge. For one thing, the college is grooming some of the assistant directors to move up as retirements loom.
It has also invested tens of thousands of dollars and a staff member’s time in establishing a database that records information about the history and operation of systems and buildings on the campus. Ms. Schneider says Loyola needs to get some staff members to do a “brain dump” into the database—all the knowledge they have about, say, the heating and cooling systems. But even that database will not capture the nuances of working on a particular machine, she notes.
Growing From Within
Mr. Gray, at Middle Tennessee State, is thinking about a database purchase and his own succession plan. In college facilities, he says, it’s better to grow your successors from within than to hire from outside. Mr. Gray, who is 60, had been thinking about retirement and had indicated this to his second-in-command, Joseph Whitefield, executive director of facilities. Mr. Gray had started delegating some responsibilities to Mr. Whitefield and other employees, to give them training in anticipation of his departure.
But the economy has complicated that effort, too. Mr. Gray saw his retirement account shrink, and now he plans to stick around. He wonders whether he should take responsibilities back from employees who have taken to their new roles. And he worries about how his delayed departure might affect Mr. Whitefield’s hopes for advancement—and commitment to the university.
“You’re looking across the desk, and you say, ‘I was thinking about retiring, but now I don’t think I want to,’” Mr. Gray says. “And he’s looking at you like, Well, I was planning on making a little more money. I was planning on staying.”
Mr. Whitefield, 43, an engineer who had worked for federal contractors before going to the university, says he has no plans to leave. (That might change, he adds, if several years go by without some kind of advancement.) He likes the respect he gets as an engineer on the campus; at a company in the private sector, he might be one of many.
“I’m not anxious for anyone to retire,” he says. “As a matter of fact, when I look at the sheer numbers of people in our organization that are in that retirement age, it’s kind of frightening to think that if you became the head of the organization, you would have a bunch of new people everywhere.”
