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No matter how you slice and dice it, finding, landing, and keeping good people is a daunting task.

By Amy R. Ramos

Academics and cultural commentators may disagree about whether the impending wave of baby boomer retirements and smaller growth in the workforce will actually lead to the labor shortage predicted by many observers. But Desi Reno, the integrated waste manager for San Joaquin County (CA), is certain of one thing: “I cannot recruit diesel mechanics.”

Reno is frustrated by the difficulty of attracting qualified staff to operate his county’s active and closed landfills and transfer station. In that respect, he has something in common with a colleague on the other side of the country: Marcia Papin, the solid waste disposal manager for Greenville County (SC), finds herself plagued by a shortage of skilled trade workers, such as truck drivers, equipment operators, and equipment mechanics. Papin, whose agency operates a landfill, laments the “stigma” that she says seems to be associated with skilled trade jobs these days.

According to figures provided by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the number of people employed in the category of “waste management and remediation services” grew by 18% between 2000 and 2006. Determining how solid waste managers should respond—or even how much of a challenge industry growth and workforce demographic changes will present—is not a simple task, however. Managers’ experiences vary considerably according to labor market conditions in their geographic region, and their staffing concerns range from finding skilled trade workers to retaining innovative engineers to grooming effective managers. Yet in discussions with municipal solid waste managers from all over the country about the challenges of recruiting and retaining the solid waste workforce of today and tomorrow, several themes emerged: developing the skills of workers at all levels of the organization, burnishing the image of the solid waste management field, and the need for strong leadership to inspire employees and cultivate their loyalty.

That means all kinds of employees, although managers’ disparate experiences may make the problem difficult to define. For example, while Papin of Greenville County relates difficulties in recruiting equipment operators, Timm Schimke states that in his area, there is “no lack of people with heavy equipment experience.” Schimke, the director of the Deschutes County (OR) Solid Waste Department, acknowledges that he is “always training” because he is rarely able to hire people with solid waste experience, but he notes that he typically gets a large applicant pool because the county is considered a desirable employer. There is a similar lack of consensus with regard to professional jobs in the industry. Bruce Parker, president and chief executive officer of the National Solid Wastes Management Association (NSWMA), says the interesting and challenging work, competitive pay, and career mobility make hiring engineers to work in the solid waste field less problematic than recruiting skilled workers such as mechanics. Papin—blessed with a location near “a couple of fine engineering schools”—concurs with Parker’s assessment. On the other hand, Jeremy O’Brien, director of applied research for the Solid Waste Association of North America (SWANA), says that association members are having problems attracting engineers to design landfills and leachate systems. This conclusion more closely matches the experience of Reno of San Joaquin County. Newly minted engineers, he says, tend to be more interested in building bridges and highways—not the landfill gas systems he needs. Meanwhile, Brian Tippetts, director of the Solid Waste Department for La Crosse County (WI), expresses greatest concern about hiring effective managers. “As key people leave,” he explains, “you go out to the marketplace to hire replacements and realize you can’t find people with exactly the right skills.” He attributes the limited pool of managerial employees to a lack of alignment between university curricula and industry needs.

From Landfill to Executive Suite, a Skills Gap
Although the jobs of equipment operator and manager are considerably different, leaders in the solid waste management field seem to agree with Tippetts’s assessment that a “disconnect” between the educational system and the industry has exacerbated the problem of recruiting and retaining staff. Papin says her most skilled equipment operators attended a yearlong program at a local technical college to learn their trade but notes ruefully that the program was discontinued in the mid-1980s. According to Papin, the basic skill sets she looks for—math up to geometry, reading (parts manuals, articles) and writing (accident reports, performance evaluations), operating diagnostic tools, basic construction surveying—haven’t changed drastically, but the number of people with those skills has decreased. She attributes the change to the emphasis that high schools now place on a college preparatory curriculum, which she says has come at the expense of vocational education. And San Joaquin County’s Reno says flatly, “I think it’s remiss of the educational system not to have shop class.” Marshall Gartenlaub, statewide director for applied competitive technologies for the California Community Colleges, sees a different problem: While modern workplaces frequently require employees to work collaboratively in teams—replacing the individual producer model of years past—students at the high school level are generally expected to work on an individual basis. To address the shortage of qualified workers, Reno believes the solid waste industry may need to follow the lead of companies such as Toyota in training its own.

Indeed, in the area of skilled trade jobs, solid waste managers may be able to learn from the experience of the manufacturing industry, which has been undertaking a broad-based effort for the past 15 years to develop the skills of its workforce. Leo Reddy, chief executive officer of the Manufacturing Skill Standards Council (MSSC), explains that the effort grew out of a survey conducted in 1990 by the National Council for Advanced Manufacturing, which generated strong responses from participating manufacturers about a growing skills gap in the workforce. (The concerns of manufacturers will sound familiar to solid waste managers: A third of the respondents to a 2005 National Association of Manufacturers survey reported insufficient reading, writing, and communications skills in their labor pool.) Reddy says reports of the death of the US manufacturing sector—widespread in the general media—have been greatly exaggerated, noting that manufacturing represents 13% of the nation’s gross domestic product. While Reddy acknowledges that manufacturing lost 3 million workers between 2002 and 2004, he says most of those people were working in jobs that do not require a specific skill—many of these jobs became automated—and that there are plenty of manufacturing jobs for skilled people. To that end, the MSSC has partnered with the Employment & Training Administration (ETA) of the US Department of Labor to develop a set of required competencies for skilled manufacturing workers and a certification program to be administered through community colleges. Reddy says the standards—including math, science, information technology, adaptability, reliability, and communication—are applicable to all sectors of manufacturing and all occupations within it; the industry’s long-term goal, according to Reddy, is to have 40% of the manufacturing workforce certified.

Jim Warner is concerned about upgrading the qualifications of employees at the other end of the spectrum as well. Warner, executive director of the Lancaster County (PA) Solid Waste Management Authority and a member of the SWANA board, is working toward updating the training the association offers, in recognition of the new skills needed to succeed in the solid waste field. “Business sense is increasingly important in hiring management staff,” he says. “There seem to be many more business challenges than there were a decade ago. And there are business opportunities to be captured—you want managers who are going to go out and find them.” For his part, Warner says he tries to keep his top staff well-rounded in their knowledge and skill base, rather than allowing them to be “pigeonholed” in a technical area. He cites the need for one of his managers to become conversant with the intricacies of carbon-emission trading as an example of the industry’s dynamic environment and says the true skills test may boil down to the question “How adaptable are people?” Tippetts of La Crosse County echoes Warner’s views, saying that a background in engineering or hydrology should be considered secondary to management skills. “The business side is very important,” he emphasizes. “Oftentimes we hire for niches—we should be looking for what management potential [job candidates] have.”

The Challenge of Selling Solid Waste Management
In order to keep employees with leadership potential in the pipeline, solid waste managers also need to figure out how to lure new graduates into the field when, as Desi Reno says of new entrants to the workforce, “everybody wants to make the new iPod or design the next video game.” Reno’s concerns are well-founded: According to a report compiled by the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE), the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in the disciplines of civil and environmental engineering fell by 10% between 1999 and 2005—outpaced by the number of computer science degrees awarded by engineering colleges. Jeremy O’Brien believes that a greater commitment to research would help attract engineers to the solid waste field. This is perhaps an unsurprising position for SWANA’s applied research director to take, but O’Brien notes that solid waste management is a $40 billion to $60 billion industry in the US, yet he estimates that the amount invested in research by the industry is less than $20 million annually—a small fraction of the $720 million in research expenditures made by industry for all engineering disciplines, as reported by the ASEE. O’Brien reports that the extensive research in solid waste that was done in the 1960s and 1970s gave way to research in hazardous waste—and has yet to recover. O’Brien points to the State of Florida as an example of the difference a relatively small amount of money can make. Florida, says O’Brien, invests $500,000 to $1.5 million annually in research on solid waste through the Hinkley Center for Solid and Hazardous Waste Management, associated with the University of Florida’s College of Engineering. As a result, according to O’Brien, several students earned doctorates in engineering and went on to become professors, attracting students to the field and generating interest with innovations such as the bioreactor landfill. Reno concurs with the need for innovation in the solid waste field, saying it’s necessary in order to comply with new and ever-changing regulations.

For solid waste managers in the public sector, which often can’t compete head-on with the private sector in terms of compensation, marketing the advantages of the public sector can be an important strategy for recruiting and retaining staff. Tippetts of La Crosse County says his agency emphasizes its benefit and retirement package, stability, and lack of required travel or relocation in recruiting candidates. Such features can appeal to candidates at all levels of the organization: Warner of Lancaster County says his agency has some longtime employees who used to be long-haul truckers but now appreciate “being able to go home every evening.” Warner cautions, however, that “it’s important to balance retention with turnover”—a sentiment also voiced by Schimke of Deschutes County. Although he’s not sure whether it’s attributable to generational changes in attitudes toward work or to the fact that some applicants seem to have bought into the worst stereotypes about public sector employment, Schimke is concerned about the attitude of entitlement that he sees attracting some job candidates. When it comes to hiring, says Schimke, he’d “rather teach somebody the skills than try to change a bad attitude.”

Promoting positive attitudes about the solid waste management industry is another way to attract people to the field, which to the uninformed may seem like the ultimate “old economy” business. Parker of the NSWMA points to the “Driver of the Year” awards that his organization presents at its annual conference as a way of “instilling pride.” Meanwhile, the Environmental Industry Associations’ (EIA’s) Women’s Council has reached out to future generations with the coloring book it launched in 2006, says Peggy Macenas, a regional manager for the NSWMA and association staff for the council. The theme of the coloring book, “Where does my garbage go?,” is designed to educate youngsters—and their parents—about this “vitally important industry,” explains Macenas, noting that the 2007 edition of the coloring book will be in English and Spanish.

Leading the Field
As always, there are formidable challenges facing leaders in the solid waste management field, although the nature of them has changed. “The industry,” says Brian Tippetts, “has matured only recently. The changes in the past 20 years have been very dynamic,” including the shift from “a huge number of landfills to very few” and the increasing sophistication of landfill engineering. In addition to keeping up with the changing technical aspects of the field—Warner of Lancaster County cites the many energy issues as an example—managers also must be prepared to lead a changing workforce. Warner recommends taking care of basics, such as maintaining competitive pay scales; he notes that his authority, after losing staff to nearby agencies, had to increase its pay rates to recruit and retain equipment operators.

But the challenges will extend beyond fundamentals such as appropriate salaries. A BLS report issued in November 2005 predicts, “In 2014, the [US] labor force is projected to be older and to become more diverse.” As a way to address the aging of the labor force, Tippetts advocates succession planning for solid waste management organizations, noting “we should have been paying closer attention” to developing the next generation of leaders. But since executives “already have more than enough to do,” he says, they may need financial incentives to do succession planning. Municipal executives like city managers or elected officials such as county commissioners, muses Tippetts, may need to hold executives accountable for their succession planning—and help manage the fear that executives may feel about developing subordinates to assume the top spot someday. “You have to make a spot for them” in the meantime, he insists. Even though an agency might end up losing an employee in which it’s invested a lot of training, this type of professional development, says Tippetts, will benefit the industry as a whole.

Parker of the NSWMA advocates a similar approach to developing the skills of entry-level workers. His list of fundamental skills sounds similar to the competencies for manufacturing workers developed by the MSSC: English language skills, computer literacy (for effective operation of increasingly high-tech trucks), interpersonal skills, and reliability. “All organizations,” he declares, “need to promote those skills and help their workers develop them. We need to be proactive.” Gartenlaub of the California Community Colleges takes a similar view. Managers, he says, often don’t know the skill levels of their employees—or else overestimate them. He urges employers to assess the skills of their current workers and invest in training to provide them with the skills—math, analysis, interpersonal—they need to succeed in their jobs. Some tools are already available.

Sharon Miller, the director of academic and technical education for the US Department of Education’s Office of Vocational and Adult Education, points to two programs launched by her office, the College and Careers Transition initiative and the Career Clusters initiative, that have brought together representatives from secondary education, postsecondary education, and the employer community to ensure that students who have completed academic or technical training possess the skills that employers expect of their entry-level workers.

Many solid waste industry jobs, such as driver, equipment mechanic, and engineer, are represented in the 16 clusters (www.careerclusters.org).

What will those future workers look like? Parker believes that, as succeeding generations of solid waste managers—better educated and more sophisticated than many of the mom-and-pop operators of past decades—rise to leadership positions, there will be increasing diversity in the management ranks. Figures from the BLS indicate that—although the number of Latinos working in the solid waste industry has increased—their proportion of the workforce as a whole remained constant from 2000 to 2006. However, Parker cites anecdotal evidence of an increased Latino presence in the solid waste workforce. Even if BLS figures don’t bear this out yet, a 2005 ETA report indicates that the foreign-born workforce has been increasing at a faster rate in the US than the number of native-born workers. Because so many immigrants come from Mexico and elsewhere in Latin America, it may simply be a matter of time before this demographic shift becomes more readily apparent in the solid waste field.

To address the issue of limited English proficiency in the immigrant workforce, the NSWMA—with help from a federal OSHA grant—has produced a series of safety videos in English and Spanish. While creating a culture of safety for all workers is critical in the solid waste field, the experience of the manufacturing industry indicates that such types of communication may be only a first step. Gartenlaub explains that a vocational English as a second language (VESL, pronounced “vessel”) program grew out of the effort to teach the manufacturing skills standards when it became apparent that many workers needed a better grasp of English in order to learn other required skills. VESL is targeted at workers who have already achieved an intermediate level of English proficiency and is generally tailored to a particular employer or group of employers.

A different concern relates to women in the solid waste field. Although Macenas of the EIA Women’s Council notes that women have been represented in the industry for a number of years, their numbers have been small—and may actually be shrinking. The percentage of women in the waste management and remediation services workforce decreased from 18% in 2000 to less than 14% in 2006, according to BLS figures. If it continues, this trend could spell trouble: A February 2006 report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers warned that a decrease in the number of women in the workforce may limit economic growth, noting that women—who now constitute a majority of undergraduate and graduate students—are some of the nation’s best-educated workers.

Flexibility in scheduling and creation of a supportive workplace can be key practices to retaining women, according to the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California’s Hastings College of the Law—and can also be appealing to a new generation of workers, both male and female. Macenas points out that the EIA Women’s Council began as a social organization but evolved into a professional network for women in the solid waste industry to acquire (or act as) mentors and to exchange ideas.

The council emphasizes professional development, hosting conference calls on a variety of topics as well as an executive roundtable and educational programs at conferences, which are open to all members of either association.

Ultimately, it will be the establishment of professional communities and opportunities for continuing education and skill development that keep employees engaged in their work and committed to their organizations. The solution, as Desi Reno puts it: “The manager has to be charismatic—has to keep people interested and curious. You have to make them see that their skills can be applied to a greater mission.”

Reno, who worked in the private sector for a major waste hauler for more than 17 years, stresses the stewardship role that he believes is paramount in the public sector. It’s the manager’s job, he says, to put employees’ work in context—to show them the “higher purpose” of their work and make them realize that they’re “preserving a part of the earth.”

Based in Santa Barbara, CA, Amy R. Ramos writes on scientific and technical subjects.

MSW - July/August 2007