I’ve been interviewing with a lot of companies lately, and I recently heard a comment on the state of the industry that attracted my attention. An employer I was talking to mentioned, off-hand, that despite the economic conditions and the number of people looking for jobs, companies are having a surprisingly difficult time finding personnel with middling experience, the solid earners who are not too junior, not too senior. As this was a side point and the speaker was developing a thought, I never did share my observations on the matter, but they have been scratching at the back of my brain since.
The economic meltdown has everyone pinched, and engineering companies have tried different approaches to weather the rough spot. Some started dropping their fees dramatically — even below sustainability level, what we call in the business “buying work”, so eventually many others had to follow. Retaining personnel to do the work became a challenge. I observed four main strategies (not all at companies I worked for):
- Squeeze the personnel. Cut the employee list then get everyone who is left afraid, and extract the maximum “productivity” by directly passing the pressure of under-costing jobs, giving too few hours and the same deadlines so that employees will essentially do work for free. Ruthless, makes for unhappy employees, but also for a lean and mean proposal style and minimum management headaches — in the short run.
- Half-time. Cut hours across the board and distribute the work as evenly as possible. Humane and fair but you may still lose employees and spreading the work is a management challenge. You don’t always have the right personnel to match to work coming in. As a result, only small and committed companies take this approach.
- No parachute. Give the junior personnel responsibilities well ahead of where they nominally are and let them learn through doing, very fast and under pressure. If they are talented, they will learn very fast from this accelerated exposure and become extremely productive at low billing rates. If they screw up, management can fire them and control damage, then move on to the next expendable wizkid.
- Retreat to the core. Keep only the most essential pillars of the company, the people with 30 years of experience who ensure continuity, and give them raw recruits to do the grunt work. The idea is that the veterans will catch most mistakes and any rework will be relatively cheap at junior personnel’s rates.
In the long run, this tends to give all companies an age pyramid that is pinched in the center, with a wider base and top, a topiary look. It’s most pronounced in case #4 because it’s integral part of the approach, and least in case #2, because these companies try to retain all their employees. Cases #1 and #3 tend to have a narrower top than #4, but a wide base and narrow middle too. But in the long run, even type #2 ends up making it financially non-viable for the middle-range (say 8-15 years of experience) professionals who have families to support — especially women — so that a lot decide to move into other fields with more employment, for example computer/information technology.
Moreover, everyone is thinking in terms of the last three years’ worth of economic morass, but they forget that for several years before that, the economy was already screwed up for any work that was not related to the housing bubble. In my business, that means pretty much any work except what is related to site development or redevelopment. So a lot of environmental engineering and science work was already curtailed and I have observed the various coping strategies used early on in those specific types of work.
No, I’m not particularly surprised to see an unfortunate distribution among environmental professionals’ experience range.
