Facilities management Keeping skilled staff By Chuck Morris
Our jobs have been around for much longer than the date in the above advertisement. Thankfully the salary for our positions has increased dramatically as well!
With so many facility management people retiring these days, and a number of former facility managers being asked to come back, I just had to cover this topic once again. I am aware of a num-
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Ops Talk • Fall 2015
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ber of openings coming up and there is a fear that there are not enough people trained and with good credentials to fill these spots. Is that really the case? As a group, we have been discussing
how we are going to fill vacancies for many years. A lot of our tradespeople left the educational facility environment to ply their skills in the north with oil and gas because the almighty dollar became the draw. The differences between what we can/could pay these tradespeople and what the oil and gas industry offered cannot be matched. In an effort to keep as many of these certified people as possible, we attempted to place our efforts in different areas, trying to make our environment better. How did we do that and how do we continue to do so? The jobs our skilled trades have are for the most part very good jobs. There should not be a lot of stress involved in their daily work life. Once in a while, pressure may be evident to complete something ASAP, but those days are few and far between. What else could be done? We looked at training as an example; when a tradesperson is hired to work in a school district facilities environment, they come (usually) with minimal experience, except in their respective trade. We end up providing training on quite a regular basis to allow the incumbent to learn how to deal with security systems, or install phone systems, P/A systems, maintain wet and dry fire sprinkler systems, deal with cross-connection health issues, and more. This comes all at a cost to the district, but allows the individual to expand their knowledge and put the newfound skills into practice, for you. We cannot stop there, because as many of us have seen, once trained and skillful with all the newfound training and certification, they become very marketable. That is the down-side;
