What Is It…What Are the Causes…What Can We Do About It?

According to Joel Leonard, president of SkillTV.net, known throughout the industry as “the maintenance evangelist,” the facilities profession is facing a crisis — due to a lack of skilled professionals entering the building trades. When asked why the cause for alarm, Leonard related an experience he had had several months ago. “One day on the radio I heard President Obama deliver a speech in Raleigh, North Carolina,” he said. “The speech proclaimed that we need to develop 10,000 engineers each year — and we need to develop more strategies and approaches to reduce energy costs. I was ecstatic when I heard his words. The highest position in the land was recognizing the value that skilled engineers and technicians give to this country.”

Reality set in later that day, however, when Leonard received a phone call from his friend, a vocational education teacher. The teacher said that the school system he worked for was reducing his employment to part-time status because of the low enrollment in his metal shop class.

“Learning about my friend’s fate that day made me realize that we still have a long way to go before the skilled trades get the recognition and support they deserve,” he said. “This friend of mine is one of the best instructors around. Only a few months earlier he was featured in a television documentary on technical schools…I still can’t believe that school administrators are so short-sighted as to allow students, who have no maturity, knowledge or experience, to help decide which vocational classes to offer. They seem to totally ignore the needs of the area’s employers, who are begging for qualified technicians.”

But education is just one of many aspects of the shortage in skilled engineering and building-operations professionals — a problem that threatens to widen as the economy improves.

What Is the Maintenance Crisis?

“America is in the midst of a major maintenance crisis,” Leonard said. “It’s being caused by the retirement of millions of skilled maintenance technicians and maintenance professionals. But there are a lot of other reasons, too, such as a lack of interest in the profession by future generations, widespread reliance on increasingly complex new equipment with inadequate budgets for training, and old equipment that continues to age and require more maintenance.”

The problem is only going to grow worse in coming years, according to Leonard. “A perfect maintenance storm is brewing,” he said, “and it’s forming largely below the radar of our movers and shakers. As an example, I just visited with the Harley-Davidson training director and he said that they have 4,500 manufacturing personnel and that the average age was fifty-five. More skilled workers are nearing retirement age, but are they doing enough to prepare the next generation with those skills?”

Investing in People

Michael B. Cowley, CPMM, president, CE Maintenance Solutions, LLC, learned the hard way that investing in people is one of the most essential things a company can do, particularly when it comes to building operations and manufacturing, where new technology is constantly evolving.

Cowley began his career in the building trades 34 years ago, when he got his job as a pipe fitter — a job that allowed him to get his engineering degree at Old Dominion University in Virginia.Aft er graduating, he landed a job with Burlington Industries, at the time one of the largest textile manufacturers in the world.

Flash forward a few decades, however, and Burlington was no longer the powerhouse it had been when he had started working there. In fact, aft er years of slowing sales, it went bankrupt in 2001. “Sure, some of the problem was with overseas competition,” Cowley said. “But the real problem was that they cared more about how big their company was instead of the quality of their product.
They took a short-term approach that ignored training.”

Cowley cited companies like Apple, Microsoft and Motorola as good examples of companies who invest in their workforce. He even gave a nod to Milliken Industries, “Burlington’s arch-nemesis,” as an example of a company that took a long-term approach. “Some people regarded Roger Milliken (the company’s founder and chairman, who recently passed away) as being a little too tough on other people sometimes,” said Cowley. “But Milliken was tough on other people because he cared about his company, his customers, and the quality of his product. Milliken took a forward-thinking approach to investing in its people. They were wellknown in the industry for its commitment to training.”

Cowley said that few companies today take a long-term approach, particularly when it comes to training building-operations professionals. “Companies that fail to make investments in their people will pay for it in the long run,” he said. That notion is particularly true when it comes to building operations. “You can’t train an electrician overnight,” he said. “It takes time and energy. Companies like Motorola understood that; in their glory days the company used to say that they got $10 back for every dollar they spent on training. I believe that figure remains true for all companies, but few companies recognize that.”

“It All Begins at Home”

But according to Cowley, it is not just companies that take a short-term approach — the culture we live in makes it difficult to raise young people who are willing to work in the building trades. “Everyone wants the easy fix,” Cowley said. “It can be painful to do things the right way. You have to work at it to get things right, and parents aren’t willing to take the time to teach their children that,” he added. “For example, I have a friend who told me he was tired from having to mow his lawn that day. His son is 14 or 15 years old, so I asked him, ‘Why can’t your son mow the lawn?’ His reply was that his son never did it the way he liked or wanted it to be done. But I wasn’t talking about how to get the lawn cut — I was talking about teaching his son the importance of manual work like mowing the lawn,” he added. “If we don’t teach kids the importance of this type of work, we will continue to have too many workers in cubicles and not enough of them working in the skilled trades. It all begins at home.”

Cowley also believes that parents should think about other options for their children besides college. “Parents insist that their children go to college,” he said. “It’s as though parents think they’re doing some kind of harm to their kids if they don’t shell out a couple of hundred thousand dollars for their kids’ college education. But large companies like McDonald’s, Wal-Mart and Disney have fantastic training programs that are free. And the average engineering degree from a lesser-known school like Old Dominion is great, unless you’re designing space shuttles. The education itself is not nearly as important as what you do aft er you get the education.”

“We Don’t Have a Maintenance Crisis”

Dennis M. (Denny) Hydrick, CFM, CPMM, facilities operations manager at Lockheed Martin IS&GS-ENS in King of Prussia, Pa., said he is aware of the maintenance crisis in the United States, but it hasn’t affected his town, a half-hour drive from Philadelphia, as much as other parts of the country. “We don’t have a shortage of skilled labor around here,” Hydrick said. “Pennsylvania is still pretty much a blue-collar state.” He continued, “That may not be true in Philadelphia or Pittsburgh, but for the places in between, we don’t automatically push kids to go into college. We give them a choice of whether they want to go to college or to do something different, like work in the building trades.” He added, “As a result, I never had a real problem getting what I would call ‘semi-skilled’ workers who have the knowledge and motivation to be trained in a skill. Also, it never hurts to work for a company that everyone wants to join.”

Hydrick said he is able to recruit workers who have at least a basic knowledge of electricity, HVAC and plumbing. “Some of them have even more than a basic knowledge of those areas. I like to say that most of them are semi-skilled in those areas, and from there Lockheed takes them and trains them until they become skilled,” he said.

What type of training does it take to go from semi-skilled to skilled at Lockheed Martin? “The majority of our Training is company mandated,” Hydrick said. “For example, we’re very big on safety training. But then there is also training in technical areas, like specific training on air handlers. In fact, whatever supplier we buy the equipment from we have it written into the contract that their company will provide training on that equipment to our workers.”

When asked how much time should be devoted to training, Hydrick referred to Cowley as the expert. “Mike always says that training should take, on average, 5 to 10 percent of a worker’s time,” said Hydrick. “A lot of people we hire are skilled already, so for us it is about training for a particular piece of equipment.”

Hydrick noted that in his area there is a high regard for skilled workers. “There’s even a vocational high school (Mercy) in our area that is devoted exclusively to vocations,” he said. “In fact, I went there and gave a speech recently for Awards Day, where they were giving an award to a graduate of the school whom we hired. We have another great school in the area, Williamson Trade School, which also focuses on the trades, so we’re very lucky from that standpoint. Most areas of the country have cut back on those types of programs.”

Hydrick is also lucky when it comes to his training budget. “Our training budgets are flexible. If we need training in an area, we can usually find money for it,” he said. “And we don’t mind spending that money on training. Some companies don’t like to spend money on training because they’re afraid that they’ll train a person, and then the person will quit and go somewhere else.”

Taking Steps Toward a Solution

According to Leonard, the first step in finding a solution for the maintenance crisis is to “remove the stigma associated with perceptions of maintenance.” He is quick to contrast the way we treat the field of maintenance with the way we treat more glamorous industries, such as entertainment. “Why are there so many ‘American Idol’ and athletic wannabes?” he asked. “It’s because we’ve glorified those activities in the media. Meanwhile, the best maintenance technicians are kept in the shadows. At SkillTV, we turn that around by interviewing the best of the best in our industry and sharing their stories with media outlets like CNBC and other news programs.”

Leonard continued, “We need to challenge MBA programs to educate future business leaders about the profit contribution that maintenance and reliability programs can provide. If we are going to give maintenance the type of focus it deserves in the media, then we also need enlightened executives and CEOs who understand the importance of maintenance.”

One additional solution, he noted, “is to develop incentives for older or retired workers to mentor groups of future technicians.” AFE Executive Director Wayne Carley, PhD, agreed on the importance of encouraging mentorships between older and younger workers — “a solution where AFE members can help most,” said Carley.

Richard Stukey is the former senior editor of the Facilities Engineering Journal.