In upstate South Carolina, some people will drive 45 minutes from Greenville to a custodian’s job at Clemson University, just to be associated with Tigers football. “Upstate bleeds orange,” says Tom Jones, who directs work-force development in facilities at the university. “People want to be part of Clemson just because it’s Clemson.”
It’s one attraction that Jones has used to fill positions there, but now it’s not enough. Clemson, like many other institutions, is struggling to find people to hire as custodians, electricians, carpenters, maintenance workers, and in other skilled trades. The shortage puts additional strain on facilities staff, which is already struggling with an aging work force and a growing list of projects to tackle.
“With something as simple as cutting down a tree, it took me over six weeks to find somebody who would give me quotes,” says Jones. “And when they finally gave me quotes and I accepted it, the work was eight weeks out.”
Sixty-one percent of respondents to a Chronicle survey conducted earlier this year, with support from the Huron Consulting Group, said that hiring employees in building services was a “serious” or “moderate” problem in January, February, and March, compared to the year before. It was the third most-difficult area to hire for, behind information technology and dining services.
The staff shortage has had a direct impact on the deferred-maintenance backlog, according to the 10th annual “State of Facilities in Higher Education” report, produced by Gordian, a company that tracks facilities’ conditions in higher education and advises colleges on strategy. Labor-market pressures compound other challenges in the facilities work force: More positions in facilities require advanced technical skills, which requires more training and certification. And colleges have long struggled with the aging of current staff members heading toward retirement and holding essential knowledge about the institutions’ buildings and systems in their heads.
“It’s going to be one of the more-important issues that we talk about in our state of facilities next year,” says Pete Zuraw, vice president for market strategy and development at Gordian.
“I’m just trying to fish for anybody who’s got a solution, and I’m not finding people who’ve got really effective solutions,” he says. “We’re reaching, in some cases, crisis situations with folks that just don’t have staff.”
In some ways, the shortage represents higher education’s influence on the labor market. For over 40 years, the nation has emphasized college as a desirable postsecondary route, while the trades and other hands-on occupations have struggled to draw young workers. Even among populations who would have to stretch academically and financially to attend college, the “dirty jobs” in maintenance and the trades have carried a stigma as lowly and low-paid occupations. You may have heard the typical American homeowner say how hard it is to find a plumber these days. Now imagine finding plumbers and other tradespeople to service some of the biggest higher-ed institutions in the country, with dozens of buildings, miles of sewer and electrical lines, and hundreds of acres to maintain. Although many organizations in work-force development have supported a revival in apprenticeship programs — in which students earn money while learning a trade on the job — there are only about 600,000 apprentices in the United States, compared to roughly 17 million college students.
With something as simple as cutting down a tree, it took me over six weeks to find somebody who would give me quotes.
Local regulations and labor-market conditions have had an outsized impact on some institutions. Cities with high construction activity drive up the local wages, with construction firms and colleges competing for people in the same pool of labor. American University has been unable to fill some jobs for a year, despite paying more than other institutions in the Washington area, says Michelle Frederick, senior director of talent development at the university. “We’ve always wanted to do an apprentice program, but D.C. law won’t allow us to do that,” she says, adding that she has never gotten a clear answer from the city why apprenticeship programs are banned. (The city has not responded to a similar question from The Chronicle.)
Some institutions have put a priority on retaining their current employees. “Let’s quit worrying about the people we don’t have, and let’s figure out how to keep people we do have,” says Jim Jackson, associate vice chancellor for university operations at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
When the state passed a law to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, Jackson took money from open positions on staff and reinvested it in raises for custodians and other essential workers in his department — with some getting a 20- to 30-percent bump. The department also set up clear career ladders and career goals, showing current employees exactly what they needed to do to achieve a specific salary, which Jackson believes will help the university hang on to people.
The university is also buying cleaning robots and other automated equipment — and for custodial workers, part of the career-ladder trajectory involves learning how to program and operate the equipment. “As we get higher-performing people,” Jackson says, “we can do more with less resources.”
The University of Virginia, which has had a shortage in building and maintenance workers, has operated a state-supported apprenticeship program for facilities workers for more than 40 years, but it has made adjustments to the program this year. The university found that some apprentices wanted to change to a different trade after a few months or years in the job. So now, new apprentices spend the first two years in the program trying out all five trades — carpentry, electrical, HVAC, masonry, and plumbing — then spend the last two years of the program concentrating on one of them.
“We integrate leadership skills into the technical skills and give them opportunities to serve on committees, to impact our safety program and things like that,” says Laura Duckworth, director of occupational programs at UVA. The university lines up recruitment programs at local organizations, like the Boys and Girls Club of America, to talk to young people about careers in maintenance and show them what the work is like with small demonstration projects.
Seventy percent of the apprentices who have gone through UVA’s program are still with the university. “We’re trying to create what we’re calling regenerative pipelines,” says Duckworth. “As you progress through your journey, someone is there to backfill and start their journey, and then as you finish your journey, you’re giving back to the folks into the program that helped you along the way.”
Hiring Students
Student labor is often underutilized in facilities departments. Lander Medlin, president of APPA, an association for physical-plant directors, says that hiring students to work in facilities would not only help a college with its labor shortage, it would also provide essential real-world experiences to help students land jobs after graduation.
“Think of the connections with the academic side of the house — with all aspects of the engineering school, with the business school, and now with computer science,” given all the technology used in building automation, Medlin says. At some institutions — particularly in the Midwest — union contracts and conventions may get in the way of hiring students, she notes. In other cases, contracts with third-party maintenance companies might add a layer of complexity.
We’re reaching, in some cases, crisis situations with folks that just don’t have staff.
The Pennsylvania College of Technology, a branch of Penn State University, is uniquely positioned to use student labor: The college has a number of programs in the building trades, and campus projects often act as learning experiences for the students. Students in the concrete-science program, for example, work with college staff and faculty members to prepare a site and set up forms. “But as far as actually pouring concrete, our students are doing that work,” says Tim Rissel, the college’s executive director of general services. “I can’t tell you the last time that we paid an outside contractor to do sidewalk work around campus, and we have miles of sidewalks.”
It wasn’t always that way. When Rissel arrived at the college, the facilities staff did not include many students. “Everybody said there’s a lot of red tape for trying to get student workers,” says Rissel, but he found that wasn’t the case. One of his student employees is training to become an electrician.
“He just completed his first year of electrical technology program, and he is keeping up with the pace of my team of career electricians,” Rissel says. “It’s amazing to see that talent existing at such a young age. You can only learn so much in the lab. You can only do so much in a textbook.”
The biggest barrier to hiring students at most institutions is their attitude about the work. Clemson University has a highly ranked architecture school and other programs related to buildings and facilities, but Jones, the work-force development director, has had trouble drawing students to his internships, which offer hands-on experience in maintenance.
“They want to come in, sit in the office, and do research,” he says.
Instead, he has gotten more candidates from an “internal internship” program at Clemson that helps people in less-skilled positions on staff move up. Custodians and landscapers, for example, can spend part of their time with teams of electricians, plumbers, and HVAC workers, learning the skills. When openings come up, those interns have a better chance of landing the jobs.
Jones used to be able to rely on aging construction workers, carpenters, electricians, and plumbers who would leave high-paying jobs in private industry to join the university staff as project managers. A university job was a lower-paying but cushier gig that offered steady employment, good health benefits, and, after several years, an opportunity to join the state’s pension plan.
Jones says that hiring strategy could temporarily plug holes on the staff, but it wasn’t a perfect solution. Some older workers would join the university and then spend significant time on medical leave, often to repair joints that had borne the brunt of decades of labor, before they would retire and draw a state pension.
Eventually, the state changed the pension-qualification rules. “It makes it harder to recruit,” Jones says wryly, “but I know why they changed it.”
