About eight years ago, Cupertino Electric, Inc. started getting serious about the future — or at least more serious than it had been in the past. Executives at the San Jose, Calif.-based electrical contracting firm had known for a while that the company’s labor pool, along with the workforce across the country, was getting older. But it was about that time that Vice President of Operations John Sales and his colleagues realized they needed to do something to stem the tide.
“At that time, you heard a lot in the media about Gen Y,” Sales says of kids born in the ’80s and ’90s. More commonly referred to as “millennials,” they’re generally characterized as entitled and less ambitious than their parents. Sales doesn’t go that far, instead saying that they just “learn and interact differently” than he and his coworkers did as they were coming up through the ranks. “So as we heard about that age shift, we asked ourselves, ‘Okay, how is that going to affect us? What kind of impact is that going to have on us? We try pretty hard not to look at how we’re going to be impacted two or three years from now, but how our business is going to be impacted five to 10 years from now.’”
One thing is clear: The American workforce is graying. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 20% of American workers will be older than 65 by 2015 and 25% will be older than 55 by 2020. Not only that, growth in other age groups has flattened out. “In fact, the segment of the workforce in their 30s and 40s is declining,” says Dr. Casey Chosewood. “That’s just a demographic fact.”
Chosewood is the director of the Total Work Health Program at the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), who, like John Sales at Cupertino, has kept an eye on the pending demographic shift for nearly a decade. Now that it’s becoming a reality, he says businesses can no longer ignore it. “This is a generational issue,” he says. “It’s not related to an economic cycle, and that makes it a critical issue.”
Powering down
The aging of the American workforce is a two-pronged issue. On one hand, as Sales and Cupertino have recognized, there’s the issue of replacing the older generation of workers and all of the challenges that reality presents. But the other, more pressing, matter is accommodating the changing needs of those Baby Boomers who are working later in life, either because they genuinely enjoy working or because the Great Recession has forced them to replenish their diminished retirement funds. That, says Dr. Stephen Sweet, chair of the psychology department at Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y., means reassessing the decades-old definition of the American work week.
Along with four colleagues, Sweet published the 2010 study “Talent Pressures and the Aging Workforce: Responsive Action Steps for the Construction Sector,” which examines both the demographic shift and ways in which employers can address it. “A lot of the way we orient our vision toward work is thinking in terms of employees that are either full time or not there,” he says. “But if you ask older workers what they want to do, a large portion of them say, ‘I don’t want to exit my job or the organization completely. But I’m really not too happy with the idea of working the way in which I did when I was 45, and I was trying to pay off my mortgage and pay for my kids’ college education.’”
One solution, he says, is tweaking work schedules to allow for options like flex time and a four-day work week. “You know the old Dolly Parton movie Nine to Five?” Sweet asks, chuckling. “Now we’ve got organizations working four days a week for 10 hours a day. There are a lot of advantages to that — from spending less money to heat the work space to being able to integrate more people into the office on staggered shifts.”
That’s all fine and good, but isn’t it dangerous to have all of those old folks puttering around the job site, knocking over toolboxes and tripping on ladders they can’t see because they have cataracts? First of all, shame on you for buying into such tired stereotypes. But second, and more important, experts say older, more experienced employees are actually significantly less likely than their younger coworkers to make mistakes or have accidents in the workplace. “That’s because as people get older, they learn to adapt to their new reality,” says Chosewood of NIOSH. “They find better ways of doing things. In general, we see that what they may lack in the strength and vigor, they make up for in their inventiveness and creativity around problem solving, in their ability to interact with coworkers. Those are the things that sort of make them very, very successful on the job — even if their physical abilities aren’t at their maximum.”
In fact, younger workers — who are more prone to taking risks — suffer more injuries on the job than any other age group. But as Chosewood points out, when older workers do have injuries or illnesses, they tend to be more severe and prolonged. “Their ability to return to work is oftentimes delayed,” he says. “So we think it’s incumbent on organizations to take a very interested approach in workers as they get older.”
Of course, the Age Discrimination in Employment Act prohibits employers from judging workers older than 40 based strictly on age. But there’s nothing to say that an employee’s job description can’t be altered based on his or her physical abilities or underlying health condition. “That’s where a very good occupational medicine program comes into play,” says Chosewood. “They can do these evaluations for you. They can protect the individual’s privacy and their own personal medical information that may not be work-related and come back with a reasonable set of work restrictions to advise the organization or employer.”
While many employees in the construction trades may be expected to pass a physical evaluation upon starting a new job, Chosewood recommends periodic checkups as those employees age or their responsibilities change — all of which is to say that the biggest concern may not be the workers who are getting a little long in the tooth, but the employees who will eventually replace them.
A workforce reboot
Compounding the problem of the age shift for contractors is the fallout of the housing bubble and subsequent stock market crash of 2008. For several years following the Great Recession, it was so hard for contractors to find work for the electricians they had on staff that imagining a day when recruiting the next generation was an afterthought. “For a while people said, ‘Are you kidding me? I’ve got 100 people sitting on my bench. Why should I be worried about the future?’” says Jim Spillane, a media advisor for the IBEW’s home office. “But as we’re seeing now — as things start to loosen up, as money starts to flow again, as projects start to roll — people are looking down the road and saying, ‘Whoa. This is not good.’”
So as to not get caught flat-footed, the union began running 30-second spots on national television about a year ago to promote careers in the electrical trade. In one, cranes swivel back and forth as a deep, folksy voice proclaims, “The good news is, America is coming back — more jobs, more building, more of what makes our country great.” In the other, two little girls play with a hard hat belonging to their father — who, as we learn, put in as much time to become a licensed electrician as some college students do to get their master’s degree. The message is simple: There’s plenty of work to go around, and there’s no shame in being a blue-collar worker.
Combatting the negative stigma that clouds the trades has become priority number one for firms like Cupertino. “In the past, if you didn’t go to college, you were considered a failure, so opportunities in the trades tended to get minimized,” Sales says.
Luckily, though, he’s beginning to see a turnaround, thanks to shifting perceptions and the prohibitively high costs of getting a four-year degree. “The trades are no longer viewed as a grunt industry,” he says. “The trades have become a much more technical, sophisticated industry. You’ve got to be a pretty smart cookie to be able to operate in this industry these days.”
In some cases, contractors are going straight to colleges and high schools to recruit new talent. “Developing partnerships with universities nationwide is something we’ve really started to focus our efforts on,” says Jocelyn Vines, talent acquisition manager for Helix Electric in San Diego.
Job fairs have their place, but Vines says working directly with schools to tailor programs to the firm’s needs while also making them engaging is the best way to generate interest in the construction industry. It’s especially important to Helix because it’s not a union shop and doesn’t have a built-in apprenticeship pool from which to acquire staff.
Getting a new generation of electricians in the door is one thing. Bringing them up to speed fast enough to replace those who are on their way out is another. It’s a concept Stephen Sweet, the Ithaca College professor, calls knowledge transfer. “The idea that young people can go to a trade school or have an apprenticeship and then suddenly be ready for work — I think any electrician will tell you that just doesn’t work,” he says. “People have to have years of experience before they become really knowledgeable and stop making dumb mistakes.”
He recommends having new recruits work right alongside more experienced employees from the beginning to reduce the chances of a complete erosion of institutional knowledge.
Helix has just such a program. Just under 10% of the firm’s workforce is 55 or older, and Vines says she expects that number to double in the next 10 years. In anticipation of the day when those aging employees ultimately step away, the company pairs every new entry-level employee with a senior-level manager in a mentor-mentee partnership. “We don’t want to have these recent graduates or new folks thrown to the wolves,” says Vines.
In addition to working directly with their mentor on any issues that may come up along the way — no question is too small, according to Vines — new employees are also enrolled in classroom training and an online learning program for two years. That said, the employees themselves determine their own success. “We also put it on the entry-level individuals to raise their hand,” Vines says. “The more curiosity they have and the more excited they are to learn, the further they go and usually at a quicker pace.”
Cupertino employs a similar system of on-the-job training and mentorship, and one of the most valuable ways in which that relationship plays out is through quality control measures. For those older workers who may not have the physical capabilities they had when they were coming up through the ranks, the opportunity exists for overseeing younger employees’ work to make sure it’s up to snuff. It’s a win-win: The older workers are still playing a vital role, and the younger ones learn something along the way. “Those individuals that have seen a tremendous amount of work through 40 years in the industry have a great understanding of a lot of different work types,” says Sales. “So to use their skill sets to do quality control on projects is a great asset. On the other hand, a younger generation person hasn’t seen anywhere near as much and wouldn’t bring the same thing to the table that an older generation person would in a QC environment.”
Inexperience aside, younger workers — the generation that will soon lead the electrical trade — has something going for them that their more experienced compatriots might not: fresh ideas. And Helix is working hard to capture them. “Construction is an industry that has been around for a while, and a lot of people kind of get stagnant in their mindset,” says Vines. “So having an innovative, new perspective is something that we’re also open to.”
In other words, she believes the children are our future.
Halverson is a contributing writer based in Seattle. He can be reached at [email protected].
