Industry prepares for gap in workforce

By Elliott Blackburn
The Facts

Published February 15, 2005

A process technician degree is practically a guaranteed job, according to graduate placement figures, and demand is expected to rise.

More than 90 percent of the students who graduate the process technician program in local community colleges receive jobs, according to school officials. As the national average age of plant operators nears 50 and workers edge closer to retirement, students will find an even higher premium placed on their degree, company officials said.

“It’s what we call the demographic time bomb, and it’s ticking,” said John Payne, BP operations technical training manager for the western hemisphere.

Roughly 30 percent of the plant operators currently working for petrochemical, pharmaceutical, food preparation and other plant operations locally and nationally will retire by 2015, according to a fall survey by the American Petroleum Institute.

The supply of new blood has kept up with demand so far, company officials said. But companies are looking to spark interest at a younger age, starting labs in high schools and creating scholarships at both colleges as industry braces for staff turnover.

“You’re going to have better than half of your workforce, conservatively, that will be able to leave in the next eight years or so,” said Mike Gragg, site learning leader for Dow Texas Operations. “Just to hold steady where industry’s at, there’s going to be quite a bit of demand for people with the skill set of a process technology associate’s degree.”

Operators perform all of the manual labor that is needed to bring raw material in one end of a plant and a finished product out the other, said Steve Erickson, executive director of the Gulf Coast Process Technology Alliance. The Alliance, a consortium of industry and educational groups that includes BASF, Dow Chemical, Alvin Community College and Brazosport College, refines and promotes the process technician curriculum.

All industry officials praised the skills of their current operators. Process technicians are an evolution of that job, Erickson said. The training, created in the late 1980s in the Brazosport area, focuses not just on how to move product through a plant, but why it’s done, Erickson said.

“Where the operator used to be primarily interested in what to do if a certain thing occurred, the process technician not only knows what to do, but why it did it,” Erickson said. “We found, of course, that if you know why you do something, that a lot of times you could anticipate what was going to cause a problem before it did.”

In addition to aging workforce needs, process technicians keep the industry competitive, Gragg said. Companies save an estimated $25,000 by hiring graduates of community colleges, said Mark Demark, process technology department chair for Alvin Community College.

Dow requires all of their new operators to have process technician associates degrees, Gragg said.

“The bar is raised,” Gragg said. “For a competitive advantage, we have to have a higher skilled workforce.”

All graduates of the Alvin Community College program received jobs in industry, Demark said. More than 90 percent of the graduates of the Brazosport College program, which will be expanded to include a four-year supervisory training program in the fall, were hired, department chair Gary Hicks said.

Industry may have to hire from other smaller companies for a few years until the number of new graduates meets demand, but companies have known their work force would retire en masse for years, and planned accordingly, Demark said. As students become aware of the program, the gap will close, he said.

“This problem has not been something that’s new,” Demark said. “There’s been a lot of forethought, and there’s been a lot of people paying attention to this type of thing.”

Elliott Blackburn covers industry for The Facts. Contact him at (979) 237-0151.

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Scholarships

Companies are offering $500 scholarships for four terms to full- and part-time process technology students at Alvin Community College and Brazosport College, roughly two-thirds the cost of tuition at Alvin Community College. For information about the scholarship program, visit the Center for the Advancement of Process Technology online at www.captech.org.