By Nancy Spring, Senior Editor
When Jay Butters, plant manager at Cane Island Power Park in Osceola County, Fla., talked about plans for a new 300 MW gas-fired unit, he was quick to point out to a group of visitors that it will be operated without hiring any new workers.
“When Unit 4 comes on line, it will run with the same crew of shift operators and maintenance people we have today,” he said during a POWER-GEN International technical tour in December.
Cane Island, which is owned by Kissimmee Utility Authority and the Florida Municipal Power Agency, is also upgrading its control room as part of the move to “do more with less.”
Productivity gains can offset part of the expected workforce shortfall but they won’t make up all the difference. Some analysts project that 46 percent of the power engineers working today will no longer be on the payroll in 2012. The skilled trades could present an even more difficult challenge: two-thirds of the respondents to a 2008 American Public Power Association workforce survey said the highest number of retirements in the next five years will be in the skilled trades positions—and those jobs will likely be the hardest to fill.
When land was scarce, said Stephen Toups, corporate vice president of Turner Industries Group, people battled over it, but now the battle will be over people. “I think it is war. The last bastion of reliability excellence is with people.”
A Battle for People
Toups is responsible for workforce development at Turner Industries Group (TIG), an industrial contractor that employs more than 15,000 craftsmen in the industrial manufacturing industries, including power. There is no one solution, he said, but there are several things a company can do to attract the workers it needs: maximize efforts in the field, become easier to do business with and get more people in faster.
For TIG that meant a commitment to “do it themselves,” said Lori Brannon, workforce development manager. The company started the Turner Training Academy (TTA), an award-winning program that takes a multi-pronged approach to bring new people in and help them move up.
“Rather than one massive initiative, we wanted to go after many different areas—eight welders here, a high school class there,” said Toups. “If one idea doesn’t work, you have others that can.”
The TTA is primarily designed to create a career ladder for skilled trades workers. Training and recruitment programs were already in place at Turner, said Brannon, but the TTA coordinated them to address every level of the ladder. The academy was awarded the 2008 Construction Industries Roundtable Workforce Award for innovative training and educational programs that encourage individuals to pursue a career in the construction industry. “The company has been in traditional energy, like refining and chemical plants, and now we are seeing an emergence of a new sector that demands different skills,” she said. “With new types of energy and more nuclear, we are evolving to train workers on different materials and different processes.”
Close-to-the-Gate Training
Brannon said the company always knew it was a “huge” challenge keeping up with the need for skilled workers but after Hurricane Katrina, the problem became acute. Katrina’s effects on the company’s workforce were felt as far from its Gulf Coast base as Wyoming and Montana.
“To get people in, we’ve done diversity efforts and we’re working to make construction attractive when we recruit at high schools,” said Brannon. Workers are paid while they train as long as they stay in the class and TTA provides other benefits that help make the job more attractive, like meals. People who show promise can receive training for higher level crafts and TTA provides supervisory and leadership training.
But what really makes the TTA successful is its on-the-job-site training model. Craft training is sited as close to the gate of the facility where Turner is working as possible. The TTA sets up wherever the company works, tailoring each program to the specific market, whether it’s Alabama, Montana, Texas or the Caribbean.
“At first we wanted a big building that said ‘Turner Training Academy,’ but that was all about us,” said Brannon. “TTA is all about the worker, what does the worker need?”
A Louisiana Success Story
Last summer in Baton Rouge, the mayor partnered with Turner Industries to get more people into the skilled trades pipeline and increase workforce diversity at power plants and local petrochemical facilities.
Mayor “Kip” Holden called on ministers in the minority community to identify candidates who showed the willingness to learn a new skill. TIG made a commitment to secure training opportunities, employment and a path to work. To date, 16 churches have submitted 54 candidates for employment, 17 participants are employed in construction trades and five are scheduled to start work soon. With the local Workforce Investment Board, Turner secured funding to offset costs of employer-based training and to help the participants purchase the initial supplies they needed to start work. Recruitment for the next class of candidates is underway.
“We may start by training a small class of people here but the next class will be bigger,” said Toups. “We are just trying to do things differently than we have done in the past.”