It wouldn’t have been very difficult to fill that position 10 years ago, but Charon Ware, head of facility design and construction for the Library of Congress, regularly has to repeat three-month searches because the candidates who apply are not qualified.

“I’m the federal government,” she says. “This is supposed to be the most secure place to work, but as attractive as Washington, D.C., is for people, it is equally attractive for builders, and there’s a lot of competition. I’ve been in this position three and a half years, and it is getting much harder to find qualified people.”

Ware is not alone. Executives across the country are struggling with the reality that as their facility asset managers approach retirement age, there is no one in the wings to take their place.

“I’ve seen great positions—director of research facilities, associate director of administrative services, director of facilities planning—remain open for a while,” says Charles Manula, Jr., vice president of global research facilities at Wyeth. “It’s taken six to eight months to fill those positions, where a decade ago, we could have filled them in two or three months.”

The reasons range from an overall shortage of workers to a lack of marketing for the facility management field in particular. Solutions include mentoring current employees to be the new asset managers, and working with universities to produce the kinds of employees that companies need. Everyone seems to agree that the situation will get worse before it gets better.

Demographic Nightmare

A major contributor to the situation is a fact that has nothing to do with facilities management, per se. As the baby boomers age toward retirement, there are many fewer workers to replace them.

“Impending Crisis: Too Many Jobs, Too Few People,” a book by Roger Herman, Joyce Gioia, and Tom Olivo, published in 2003, cites Bureau of Labor Statistics predicting that the United States will face a shortage of 10 million workers by 2010.

Citing the same statistics, Paul Ring, vice president of client development for CH2M Hill Facilities Services, points out that more than 25 percent of the working population will reach retirement age by 2010, while the number of young workers will increase by only five percent. By 2008, the number of workers between 25 and 40 years old will decline by 1.7 million, while the number of baby boomers eligible to retire will grow by 77 million.

The worker shortage described in these statistics will be across the board, from unskilled workers to the highest-level employee, but the picture is particularly grim at the top of the corporate ladder: The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts that one-fifth of the nation’s large established companies will lose 40 percent of their top-level talent in the next five years, says Ring.

“We have not really seen yet the full implications of this,” he says.

“We believe there is a shortage of skill sets,” agrees David Brady, president and CEO of the International Facility Management Association (IFMA). “It’s not a crisis yet, but the problem will continue to increase. I met in Washington, D.C., recently with someone from a federal agency who said they can’t find people to fill positions and are offering a bounty to engineering students for the first time in their history.”

The effects will no doubt be felt acutely in facilities management, where many of the best jobs are in manufacturing, another hard-hit sector.

The National Association of Manufacturing and its research/education arm, The Manufacturing Institute, published a “Skills Gap Report” in 2005 saying that 90 percent of manufacturers reported a moderate to severe shortage of qualified skilled production employees such as machinists, operators, craft workers, distributors, technicians; 83 percent said that shortages are currently impacting their ability to serve customers.

Manula says the upcoming generation of workers has the misconception that manufacturing is still the dirty, dangerous, dead-end job it was during the Industrial Revolution and through the baby boom of the 1950s and ’60s.

“The problem is young people don’t look at (manufacturing) jobs as glamorous,” he says. “We need to get into school systems and advise students that these are some of the most technologically advanced, automated, high-quality jobs.”

Changing Workplace

Getting students interested in manufacturing might not fill the needs of asset managers, however.

“It used to be that facilities managers tended to come up from manufacturing or engineering at the plant level,” says Manula. “More recently, we’re also looking for people with good contract, real estate, and property management experience.”

As facilities become more complicated, the job of managing them becomes more complex and demanding, so the factors that make modern manufacturing exciting also make it harder to manage. Manula concedes that part of the problem he faces is the fact that he works in pharmaceutical development, where manufacturing is done in a lab, not a factory.

“Managing an office environment, for example, is probably easier, certainly easier to outsource,” he says. “Back in the day, even a good secretary was managing the office. “Now with Good Manufacturing Practices, you need to understand the regulations and make sure systems are compliant. Even controlling building permits and waste management is demanding.”

Russ Toombs says that when he started working as a biologist at the New York State Health Department Laboratory more than 30 years ago, one of his labs had no central ventilation or air conditioning. Now, as project and facility manager for the Center for Medical Science in Albany, N.Y., the standard laboratory buildings are equipped with variable volume air handling systems.

Elusive Solutions

People working in a field are not always the best qualified to manage the facilities, particularly scientific laboratories, so hiring from within often is not practical.

“Science people don’t necessarily make good facilities managers,” says Toombs. “I had a knack for it.”

As soon as Toombs was hired at Albany’s Center for Medical Science six years ago, he began worrying about who would replace him when he retired.

“The operations manager and myself are older and planning retirement,” says Toombs. “I immediately started talking with my boss about the fact that we’re old and planning retirement. It’s hard to recruit people experienced in the field who know how to do everything.”

Their solution was to hire the best-qualified people they could find in related fields, while the retirements were still years down the road, and commit to training them for the high-tech world of medical research.

“Albany is not yet a big hub of biotech, and it’s hard to find qualified people who are not entrenched in their jobs,” says Toombs. “Everyone we hired for these jobs has roots in the community, and we are training them, but it’s a calculated risk that they will stay.”

Toombs hired 35-year-old Tricia McGaughan as assistant facility manager last year, a new position created to replace an outgoing administrative assistant. Toombs will be scaling down his duties until she replaces him when he retires in the next year or so. McGaughan had no training in the sciences, but came equipped with extensive experience in real estate procurement.

“I thought she’d be the perfect person to replace me if she could get the lab experience,” says Toombs.

Toombs had McGaughan join the American Biological Safety Association, and sent her to a week-long lab design and construction conference at the University of Wisconsin, as well as conferences sponsored by Tradeline.

“I had to learn about extensive and very technical mechanical systems,” says McGaughan. “Safety issues make me the most nervous.”

Ware, at the Library of Congress, says this kind of mentoring and training is just what businesses need to do.

“It’s time that managers and mid-level managers take a look at mentorship,” she says. “Establish protégé relationships, and not just lip service where you meet for coffee once a week. Make a real investment in training programs.”

Lee Hanson, director of security and facilities services at Alliant Energy in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, has faced the same difficulty Toombs had enticing good candidates to move to his location.

“People who are highly qualified can go anywhere they want, and Central Iowa is not necessarily the place they want to go,” says Hanson.

He taps military retirees for their technical expertise and leadership skills.

“Our average age is 47, and we’re starting to have to make those decisions,” says Hanson. “The military is a good place to go because they have a good work ethic. Most power plants are very much in sync with the Navy: It’s gas-turbine propulsion and nuclear, so we share a lot of the same technology training.”

“In the world of facilities management, we have had a very nice status quo,” warns Ring, of CH2M Hill. “Everyone has been working on the payroll for 40 years, and there’s a lot of wage creep. When they leave, there’s a loss of institutional knowledge. The bad news is that companies are spoiled because they haven’t had to put training programs into place.”

Another approach is to work with colleges and universities who offer facilities management degrees to make sure their educational offerings are in sync with what the market requires.

“We have yet to see the depth or breadth of knowledge coming out of these programs,” says Ware. “We still have to train them.”

“Facilities management is not typically a major in college,” says Ring. “We work very closely with universities like Georgia Tech, Brigham Young, and the University of Colorado.”

Manula says Wyeth recently started tapping the local universities in Philadelphia for engineering and business interns who are assigned small projects, and run critical pieces of budget planning.

“They are assigned a manager/mentor,” he explains, “and are given projects that have to get done and require collaboration.”

For the first time in the 26-year history of the IFMA, the organization has hired a person to work full time with colleges and universities, and has sent brochures to guidance counselors in every high school in the United States to introduce them to the world of facilities management.

By Lisa Wesel

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