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Assessing Alaska’s worker shortage New document takes detailed look at what occupations need workers and what future projects mean for the labor pool in state Eric Lidji Petroleum News
If you were an engineer, you’d be employed by now.
Engineering fields account for seven of the 18 professions considered critically short of qualified workers, according to a new assessment of the workforce supply in Alaska.
The assessment, released at the 2008 Putting Alaska’s Resources to Work conference on March 3, is one of the most in depth breakdowns ever compiled of around 100 key occupations needed for a slate of major oil, gas and mining projects in Alaska in the coming decade.
Many of these projects come with daunting superlatives: a gas pipeline would likely be the largest private construction project in North America; the Pebble Mine, if fully developed, would be the largest gold and copper resource in the world; and offshore oil and gas fields could be among the most difficult and costly ever developed.
Together these and more than 20 other projects constitute an unlikely “perfect storm,” where several major projects collide in 2014 and 2015, requiring more workers than Alaska can currently supply, a problem compounded by adding the thousands of workers who could realistically retire within the next decade.
Analysis, not projection The assessment is “an analysis” of projects on the horizon, not “a projection” of what will happen, according to Bill Popp, president and CEO of the Anchorage Economic Development Corp.
Still, Popp and others noted that even if only half or a quarter of the projects go into development simultaneously, Alaska won’t be able to supply enough workers with its current labor pool.
In December 2004, Popp worked to create the first draft of this assessment, and roughly determined the state would need to fill 29,000 jobs in the coming decade.
“This was a very crude document, and I was not satisfied with it, but it seemed to strike a nerve,” Popp said.
Convened this year by the Alaska Process Industries Career Consortium, the PARW group compiled the data for the new assessment from both state and industry sources.
For each of around 100 occupations, the committee looked at the number of jobs currently available in Alaska, the growth and average salary of the occupation, the age of the workers in the occupation and the number of non-resident workers in the occupation.
They compared that information with industry comment about the difficulties filling available positions in each occupation.
Altogether, the committee determined 64 of the occupations were both crucial to oil, gas and mining operations — from accounting to wildlife control — and “available,” meaning employers have been able to fill vacancies with relative ease.
However, 16 occupations — from cooks to wastewater operators — were concerning, meaning vacancies continue to get harder to fill. And shortages in 18 occupations — mainly operations and maintenance fields and engineers, but also truck drivers field inspectors and others — have become so bad that companies have actually stopped or delayed projects to recruit workers.
“These vacancies are remaining open longer than we wish and quite often we have to go to the Lower 48 to get them,” said Mary Shields with Northwest Technical Services, who served as the chair of the committee that created the assessment.
Problem from the oil days, back again The problem isn’t new.
During the construction boom accompanying the trans-Alaska oil pipeline in the mid-1970s, many businesses had trouble filling jobs. Popp recalled making $16 an hour working at Carr’s after graduating from high school at the time.
But even recently, the worker shortage is in full swing in Alberta, where the oil sands boom is turning once menial jobs into high-paying professions and threatening to leech workers from Alaska.
Many of the issues addressed at the PARW conference this year came up at the conference last year, but without the help of the new assessment. Now, many attendees — a group of trainers, educators and human resources managers — hope the document will guide future efforts to prepare the work force.
“We know what we need to have in terms of our current workforce. ... We’ve got some ideas about what’s going to happen in the future, but how do we get Alaskans to get there? And that’s really what this data is all about,” said Dave Rees, senior resources specialist with BP Exploration (Alaska) Inc.
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