mark handler
SAWHORSE
http://www.citylab.com/work/2017/02...sion-is-dying-out-and-thats-a-problem/515826/
Many of the officials who check construction plans and inspect buildings for safety are on the cusp of retirement—and they’re not being replaced.
At professional events, George Williams is used to being surrounded by people many decades his senior. The Salt Lake City-area building inspector is 34, which makes him a young gun in an aging workforce.
His role as the lone youth among venerable peers began when he first started attending professional networking and training events in 2010. Williams would walk into a continuing education course or an event held by the local chapter of the International Code Council (ICC) and he’d be one of the few people without gray hair.
“Without fail, I was the youngest person in the room, every single time,” says Williams. “Not slightly younger, but dramatically younger than nearly everyone else.”
In early 2014, his curiosity piqued, Williams asked the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing if he could view their records on the demographics of the state’s building code professionals. The department wouldn’t give him names or addresses, but it emailed him a spreadsheet with the ages of every building inspector in the state.
A crisis in numbers
Upon crunching the numbers, Williams found a looming crisis. It turns out that 60 percent of the statewide industry is close to retirement. And Utah isn’t an outlier, as he found a few months later when the ICC and the National Institute of Building Sciences released a report with disturbingly similar findings. “It comes as little surprise that the current workforce is aging and making plans for retirement,” the authors write. “However, the actual numbers are a bit alarming.”
That’s putting it mildly. Eighty-five percent of the respondents to ICC’s survey were over the age of 45. Only three percent were under 35. Most of them were looking to get out of the game in the near future: Eighty percent planned to retire within 15 years, and a full 30 percent within five.
Building code officials can serve as managers, plan reviewers (checking construction plans to make sure they’re up to par), or inspectors—or they can wear two or three of those hats at once. Inspectors are tasked with ensuring that new buildings (and renovations of old ones) have been built safely and responsibly. They carefully check that everything is braced and wired and insulated to meet the requirements of the local codes.
It also isn’t the most glamorous field of all time. “There aren’t any grade-school children right now who are drawing pictures or writing papers about becoming a building inspector,” Williams says. “I think this profession finds you rather than you finding it.”
Like many of his compatriots, Williams found the job through the building trades. Historically, people have gravitated from the trades to codes work because it’s steadier than construction, which is more vulnerable to the boom and bust of the real estate cycle.
The career wasn’t one Williams intended to pursue at first. He started attending community college for construction management. When he got a job with a local engineering firm, they asked him to get further training so he could do building inspections for them. It took him two more years to get fully certified, but even then, it didn’t seem like a long-term career.
“It thought it would just be a chapter,” says Williams. “But in 2008 the economy was down, construction was down. The thought of entering a construction company as the low man on the totem pole was not very appealing. The stability did become appealing at that point.”
Most code official positions are in state and local government. Williams is unusual, in that he worked first for an engineering firm and now for a building code consulting firm. By his estimate, 90 percent of people in the industry are employed in the public sector; both of his employers have received much of their work from government entities.
The industry is having a hard time attracting new recruits in part because the stability that attracted Williams is no longer the norm. The public sector took a beating after the Great Recession, with the number of government employees plummeting after the downturn and taking far longer to recover than private-sector employment did. Pay for those who remained actually fell. The benefits that compensate public workers for lower pay are coming under threat, too.
Many of the officials who check construction plans and inspect buildings for safety are on the cusp of retirement—and they’re not being replaced.
At professional events, George Williams is used to being surrounded by people many decades his senior. The Salt Lake City-area building inspector is 34, which makes him a young gun in an aging workforce.
His role as the lone youth among venerable peers began when he first started attending professional networking and training events in 2010. Williams would walk into a continuing education course or an event held by the local chapter of the International Code Council (ICC) and he’d be one of the few people without gray hair.
“Without fail, I was the youngest person in the room, every single time,” says Williams. “Not slightly younger, but dramatically younger than nearly everyone else.”
In early 2014, his curiosity piqued, Williams asked the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing if he could view their records on the demographics of the state’s building code professionals. The department wouldn’t give him names or addresses, but it emailed him a spreadsheet with the ages of every building inspector in the state.
A crisis in numbers
Upon crunching the numbers, Williams found a looming crisis. It turns out that 60 percent of the statewide industry is close to retirement. And Utah isn’t an outlier, as he found a few months later when the ICC and the National Institute of Building Sciences released a report with disturbingly similar findings. “It comes as little surprise that the current workforce is aging and making plans for retirement,” the authors write. “However, the actual numbers are a bit alarming.”
That’s putting it mildly. Eighty-five percent of the respondents to ICC’s survey were over the age of 45. Only three percent were under 35. Most of them were looking to get out of the game in the near future: Eighty percent planned to retire within 15 years, and a full 30 percent within five.
Building code officials can serve as managers, plan reviewers (checking construction plans to make sure they’re up to par), or inspectors—or they can wear two or three of those hats at once. Inspectors are tasked with ensuring that new buildings (and renovations of old ones) have been built safely and responsibly. They carefully check that everything is braced and wired and insulated to meet the requirements of the local codes.
It also isn’t the most glamorous field of all time. “There aren’t any grade-school children right now who are drawing pictures or writing papers about becoming a building inspector,” Williams says. “I think this profession finds you rather than you finding it.”
Like many of his compatriots, Williams found the job through the building trades. Historically, people have gravitated from the trades to codes work because it’s steadier than construction, which is more vulnerable to the boom and bust of the real estate cycle.
The career wasn’t one Williams intended to pursue at first. He started attending community college for construction management. When he got a job with a local engineering firm, they asked him to get further training so he could do building inspections for them. It took him two more years to get fully certified, but even then, it didn’t seem like a long-term career.
“It thought it would just be a chapter,” says Williams. “But in 2008 the economy was down, construction was down. The thought of entering a construction company as the low man on the totem pole was not very appealing. The stability did become appealing at that point.”
Most code official positions are in state and local government. Williams is unusual, in that he worked first for an engineering firm and now for a building code consulting firm. By his estimate, 90 percent of people in the industry are employed in the public sector; both of his employers have received much of their work from government entities.
The industry is having a hard time attracting new recruits in part because the stability that attracted Williams is no longer the norm. The public sector took a beating after the Great Recession, with the number of government employees plummeting after the downturn and taking far longer to recover than private-sector employment did. Pay for those who remained actually fell. The benefits that compensate public workers for lower pay are coming under threat, too.
