Turning Over the Keys to Tomorrow’s Energy Workforce, part I

PUF's Steve Mitnick: What is the purpose of your organization as it's evolved?

Ann Randazzo: This is the Center for Energy Workforce Development, or CEWD as we call it. It started back in 2005. We were incorporated in 2006 and we had a pretty singular mission at that point.

The energy industry was in the middle of a construction build, and saw the aging workforce coming upon us. We knew that we needed to do something to address those issues. We needed more people and we also needed to bring in younger people to replace some of the experienced workforce that was leaving.

We believe in the saying, you can do something better together than you can do it separately. So, the industry came together to share what they were doing to address the aging workforce issue. That concern led to the development of the center.

We have, now, most of the electric and natural gas utility members, along with the major trade associations: the Edison Electric Institute, the American Gas Association, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association and the American Public Power Association. That really covers the waterfront in terms of utilities.

Most recently, we have had contractors who are beginning to join. We had a big effort in the last year doing some strategic planning.

We were focusing on our tenth year.

Our contractors and their need for a workforce continues to come up.

What we've seen over the time that we've been around is we really shifted from the singular focus on the aging of the workforce. That's just one of many things that impact our workforce.

Probably the biggest issue now is this transformation of the industry and how we can help people obtain the skills that they need as the jobs are changing. It's as much a skill gap issue as it is about the aging workforce.

We have so many companies that have done great things and really put talent pipelines into place. But there is still a lot of work to be done.

PUF's Steve Mitnick: Do other issues like greater diversity of the workforce and more digitizing come into play too?

Ann Randazzo: Absolutely, because technology is one of the fastest changing issues we are dealing with. The way technology has changed just in the last four or five years is incredible.

But you overlay that with the way the industry is modernizing the grid and upgrading the infrastructure. All of that has technology embedded in it, including digitizing and being able to access data in ways that we haven't ever before.

That means the jobs change and that's really where CEWD comes in. We can help companies think about where they are in this process, and is that going to impact the jobs they offer?

What skills will people need coming in? What kind of skills does the upcoming workforce need to upgrade to? It's just a broader look at what this workforce looks like for the future.

It's very difficult to be able to forecast what kind of jobs are going to be there, and what we're going to be doing. That's where we spend a lot of our time focusing on strategic workforce planning.

We are always looking at the future, even if it's just a few years down the road. Also, how does that impact the training for people who are entering education right now?

PUF's Steve Mitnick: How does the center do this?

Ann Randazzo: We started with this idea of industry solutions with regional implementation. The idea there is that if we can figure out how to do something well, we'll give the companies a jump start. So, they won't have to start from scratch.

We began by focusing on very specific issues and identifying best practices. We pull people together and identify what's the most efficient or the most effective way to go about doing something. and then we create tools and templates to help our members companies.

We have lots of tool kits and processes and great websites with resources.

One of the most effective things has been what we call State Energy Workforce Consortia. They are almost like state chapters of CEWD.

The utilities within a state, along with their educational partners and sometimes government agencies, will all work together to figure out what's needed in the state. They also think about how to balance the education supply with the demands for workers now and in the future.

By doing that we're all sharing the load. It's very hard for one company, to set up an education program and then hire everybody coming out of that program every year.

But, if we have all of the utilities in a state, or most of them working together, somebody is going to need those people. You can sustain the programs over time with that balancing act of how many do we need and then where's the supply.

We've also focused not just on education and people going through high school and technical community college programs, but also on the military. We did a similar kind of thing called Troops to Energy Jobs where we focused on what's the best way to recruit, hire, train and retain the military.

We have a similar focus on women, particularly bringing women into non-traditional jobs. We focus on transitioning adults, and people who might be in another field. Maybe they want to make a change. Maybe their jobs are going away.

It's the combination of all those demographic sources that will make up that workforce for the future. That means we have an incredible opportunity to create a more diverse workforce.

As our workforce is leaving, the population is more diverse, and we have been actively working to make sure we have a diverse group of future employees.

It's not all about just gender and ethnicity, but there's a concerted effort in the industry to create a more diverse workforce. We have to make sure there's diversity in the classrooms and in everything we do in that talent pipeline.

PUF's Steve Mitnick: Are there big differences in doing this?

Ann Randazzo: There absolutely are. We started with this idea of what we have in common. We hit on some critical jobs that all the companies needed to focus on.

Those were lineworkers, plant and field operators, skilled technicians and engineers. Most of these jobs are pretty unique to our industry. But state by state, the needs might be different. For example, California's needs for a particular job might look very different from Georgia or Louisiana.

Focusing on what kind of skilled technicians you need, you might take a different look. That's the idea behind the state energy workforce consortia, to be able to say, "What's going on in this state, in terms of the utilities and the contractors?" And then, "What kind of programs do we need to put in place for education?"

There are significant differences. One of the things we were a little surprised at in the beginning is that the education system is so different from state to state. So, you can't just say, "Oh, this is the way that you put a program in at a community college."

Because, if you're in Indiana, they have one community college system - Ivy Tech. If you're in another state, all of the community colleges are completely separate.

You have to know how to work with your own state and what the rules are in place there. Again, that's where the consortia come into play.

We also group by seven geographic regions, and we have regional meetings. We just finished our last regional meeting earlier this month.

We pull together states and consortia from areas to talk about what they're doing, to share, and to be able to say, "If it worked in Nevada, then yeah, it might work in New Mexico." That's the idea, to be able to group that way.

We group in a lot of different ways. We do have some national meetings, but we also have communities of practice. For example, people who are particularly interested in workforce analytics or workforce planning, work together on our workforce planning council. They help us figure out the best way to do something.

Or they share ideas from one company to another. We also have communities of practice for companies that are working in high schools with high school career academies. We have a diversity community of practice.

It's another way to just kind of group based on a specific topic. And, because we have this network of people in companies across the country, we can throw out questions and people can work together and figure out the best way to do something.

PUF's Steve Mitnick: Do you feel like you're making a lot of progress? A big impact?

Ann Randazzo: I think we are making progress. It's a slow go. That was a lesson we learned early on. I must say, when we started we all thought, "Well this is going to take about five years."

We'll get all this stuff mapped out. Everybody will know what to do and then we'll move on and do something else. That, of course, wasn't true.

We have made progress in eleven years, but about the time you make progress, something changes, so there's always something new to be looking at.

Each company is making progress at their own pace and based on their own needs. One company may be far ahead, getting better at hiring veterans, for example. And another one may be surging ahead in terms of what they're doing at the high schools.

Or working with student extracurricular groups, like First Robotics, or others. Everybody is doing something great, but everybody also has areas that they can work on and learn from each other.

We are making progress. We've seen it in our survey work on hiring and retirements. We see that our workforce is getting younger, and that curve retirements have definitely slowed down.

We're getting closer to what might be considered as normal. It's not just about aging or years of service. Now it's about skills. There's a lot more work to be done.

I do think that we are making progress and all the credit goes to the companies. They are doing great work in terms of implementing, because that's where it happens.

It's what happens in the field. It's with the state consortia, and with those people that are volunteering their time working with SkillsUSA or are teaching in a technical school. It's all of those kinds of things that go into creating this talent pipeline that's going to make a huge difference in the future.

PUF's Steve Mitnick: How did you get involved in this?

Ann Randazzo: I have worked my entire career in the utility industry. I started with Georgia Power when I was fresh out of college and I've had many different careers within the company.

When we talk about millennials and wanting to move from one job to another, I look back in my career with Georgia Power and I had many different careers, but all within that same company.

There's so many opportunities. I started in what we now call IT. I worked in finance and operations, and did all kinds of different things. It's a way to move around but not necessarily move companies.

I had quite a few different roles with Georgia Power, including working for a while with the Southern Company College. That was my only experience with education.

Then my husband took a job in D.C. I moved with two babies and I started my own consulting business and kept working on projects in the southeast.

As part of that, I was asked to come and facilitate a meeting in D.C. And for me at that time it was like, "Oh, I don't have to travel. I'll be glad to do that." It was just downtown, at EEI and it was the start of CEWD.

So, I helped to figure out how you go about doing something like this, and helped put together some of the initial plans. Then we started looking for an executive director.

I just kept thinking about it. I didn't want to give it up, because I was too far in at that point. For me, it's been a great way not only to give back, but to share this kind of legacy of what a career in this industry means.

It's also nice to be able to tie together so many of the benefits I received over the years, and also what I learned in just about every job I've ever had in this industry. I was there in the beginning and have enjoyed every minute of it. It's just been a great opportunity for me, that's for sure.