Public Power - July/August 2008 - (Page 41)

employees will be eligible to retire within the next five years. At the same time, there is a growing nationwide shortage of skilled technical electrical workers, making recruitment and retention more difficult. Failure to respond to these challenges will jeopardize Seattle’s economic health. The committee’s report offered recommendations, including: • Develop and support a strategy for work force renewal. To do this: enhance financial incentives to attract and retain skilled workers; accelerate job training and apprentice programs; create incentives for advancement into mid-level management; and grow human resources from within. • Empower City Light as a business enterprise. This involves: streamlining city procedures for job reclassification; creating more exempt positions for non-represented employees; and expanding the flexible compensation program. • Enhance employee effectiveness, which involves improving communications, making decisions at the lowest appropriate level, and creating fair pay and realistic expectations. “We base our success on a number of things,” said Ziemianek. “One is our apprentice program. One way we have done this has been to get out there in the early stages of high school and community colleges, and trying to attract people into the profession.” A little over two years ago, the utility only had about 20 recruits coming in. Now, it has over 100. In addition, the Human Resources Department created a team of people focused on talking to and attracting www.APPAnet.org journey-level lineworkers. “We are also able to offer pay increases and better benefits,” he said. “With all of these efforts, we anticipate a successful turnaround here in the near future.” Lakeland Electric in Florida has also focused on programs to recruit and train new talent. One of the more serious problems relates to staffing challenges in some critical positions, said Jane Gschwender, Lakeland’s training specialist. “Oftentimes, these are jobs that it has taken people years to learn. They may manage systems that are unique to our utility, so there is a huge learning curve required to fill that position.” The utility has a host of other successful programs to deal with these needs. For instance, Lakeland keeps a pool of retirees on hand who can be rehired on a part-time, temporary basis for regular work, as well as for special projects, such as hurricane recovery and providing training to new employees. “We have taken advantage of this in many instances,” she said. These people can either work six months, full-time, or part-time, for an entire year. Lakeland also offers a deferred retirement program, where employees eligible for retirement may retire without terminating employment for up to five years while retirement benefits accumulate and earn tax-deferred interest. Instead of a percentage of their salaries going to their pension funds, it is included directly in their paychecks. “This has been very popular,” she said. “It has allowed us to keep many valuable employees working longer who otherwise would have retired.” Last year, Lakeland ended a high school recruitment pro- gram it formerly ran from 2002 through 2007. “Previously, the students had no experience or background in utility work until they entered our program upon high school graduation,” said Gschwender. “Since then, we have partnered with the Polk County school system and created a Power Academy in a new high school, which is close to our power plant.” Now, students from grades 9 through 12 will be able to have a focus on power skills, including basic utility job skills, job safety, basic electricity, blueprint reading and subjects such as hydraulics. They will also be able to observe the utility’s work sites—at power plants, with the lineworkers, and with engineers. “They will also have mentors and be able to participate in job shadowing, and maybe even some part-time paid intern positions,” she said. “There is definitely a need for a skilled work force,” said Sue Napper, director of administrative services for Owensboro Municipal Utilities in Kentucky. “Without that, reliability and customer service can be adversely affected, both in terms of not having the necessary workers on hand to respond to needs, as well as not having the specific skill sets required to do a quality job prevent reliability problems in the first place.” To begin to address these concerns in its operations area, Owensboro has increased shift premiums. “We continue to monitor these every two years to make sure they are competitive,” she said. Another strategy involves alternative scheduling methods. “We implemented a 12-hour work shift in our operations department at the power plant,” she said. “Employees, although working longer hours, enjoy more days off than traditional scheduling affords. This has worked very well.” Last year, the utility conducted a comprehensive wage and benefits survey to see how it compared to other employers in the region. “We found some areas where we were lagging the market, and we made some adjustments.” Currently, the utility’s greatest need is in the engineering area. “We are finding that the majority of engineering students already have job commitments by the beginning of their senior year,” said Napper. “We plan to reach out to some of these students a lot earlier by offering internships and part-time jobs to them, with hopes that they will come back to us when they graduate.” ❚ JULY-AUGUST 2008 41 http://www.APPAnet.org

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Public Power - July/August 2008

Public Power- July/August 2008 Contents Perspective 10 Questions Solar Energy Rising Sacramento's Solar Shares Gainesville Crowns a Conservation Idol By the Numbers Curbing Costs of Outages Reliability Green Energy Hometown Connections Customer Service Parting Shot

Public Power - July/August 2008

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