Facility management finds itself at a crossroads. According to the 2021 Global Salary and Compensation Report by the International Facility Management Association (IFMA), the FM population is generally in its late 40s, and 33% of respondents to IFMA’s salary survey plan to retire within the next 10 years.
Concern over how to replace these soon-to-be retirees has been the subject of a great many articles and essays in the industry for many years. In 2019’s “Is FM Prepared for a Technical Labor Shortage?”, former IFMA Foundation executive director Diane Levine and IFMA Fellow Nancy Johnson Sanquist point to a general shortage in skilled labor that “extends to nearly every industry, including facility management.” The article describes the IFMA Foundation’s four-pronged approach to recruiting new FM talent, including training and development for aspiring and entry-level FMs, internship and apprenticeship programs, job shadowing, and targeted recruiting.
Opportunities for young people are out there—but we can do more to bring them in and keep them with us.
As Levine and Johnson Sanquist point out, “solving the skilled labor shortage will take a village of FM professionals dedicated to tackling this problem.” Here are the top challenges facing this village—and what we can all do about it.
How Bad is the FM Recruitment Problem?
IFMA’s Global Salary and Compensation Report, which analyzes data submitted by more than 3,500 global facility professionals, reveals that responding FM professionals are generally older and have significant industry experience. However, it’s worth noting that the average age of a facility manager has actually gone down somewhat since IFMA’s 2011 survey. That suggests that some progress has been made in recruiting younger people.
Nonetheless, the statistics concerning retirement underscore the need to recruit and train additional talent. The average survey respondent plans to retire within 16 years, suggesting that now is a good time to start upskilling current employees and aggressively recruiting new ones.
“There’s an increasing level of awareness that there is a crisis,” said Raffy Espiritu, CEO and president of Impec Group and a member of the IFMA Foundation board. “To me, that’s the starting point.”
The IFMA Foundation—a nonprofit organization separate from IFMA, the professional organization—has launched a multi-headed effort to combat this crisis. Espiritu said that the foundation is intensifying its efforts to promote awareness of the field, develop FM degree programs, and offer scholarships and other initiatives.
“The visibility of facility management is just not there yet,” said Irene Thomas-Johnson, past chair of the IFMA Foundation and a global account executive for JLL. “When you put a job out there, people don’t even know what it is, or they think facility management is a bunch of people cleaning things or fixing light bulbs. It’s so much more than that,” she noted. “What I love is when I teach or have conversations with people, and I tell them what I do and where I come from, and you can just see the light bulb going off. It opens their eyes to the possibilities. I think we haven’t done a great job of telling people what facility management is.”
What Do Millennials and Generation Z Want from a Career?
Getting the field in front of people is the first step to recruiting solid talent. A chance encounter led Jonathan Barba, an assistant facilities manager for JLL and member of Generation Z, into his FM career—representatives of the IFMA Student Chapter of Chaffey College, which has a facilities management degree and certificate program, came to speak to Barba’s class. He decided to check out the IFMA student club, where he found valuable networking opportunities, and eventually took the Essentials of Facilities Management course. This experience led him to JLL, where he interned before being hired full-time.
“I built up a lot of connections that ended up leading me to reaching the opportunities that I’ve reached now,” Barba said. “I was just sitting in class, and literally, it came to me. I’m glad I was sitting in class that day.”
Opportunities like this one are important to recruitment—especially since prospective facility managers, who may be millennials (born 1981-1996, according to Beresford Research) or members of Generation Z (born 1997-2012), share many pain points that make facility management a natural fit:
- They care deeply about career growth, meaningful work, and inclusion, according to "Recruiting Generation Z Into the Field of Facility Management," an article appearing in a 2019 issue of FMJ, an IFMA publication. Facility management—and its wave of upcoming retirements—allows for steady career growth. The field’s responsibility for every aspect of buildings, from thermal comfort to health and wellness, will satisfy these workers’ desire to feel like their work matters.
- This group cares about the environment, and sustainable operations are more important than ever before, said Regina Cahill, chair of the IFMA Foundation and a retired FM who formerly served as the chair of facility management, construction management, and real estate management at Pratt Institute. A growing number of requirements around sustainability, such as the building performance standards sweeping the nation, make this a critical interest area for incoming FMs.
- Facility management relies more on digital solutions than it ever has before, especially tools that can work as force multipliers for small staffs. Workers who are digital natives are well-positioned to use these tools to interpret building data and make decisions based on the results.
“It needs to excite you, keep you passionate, and help you wake up in the morning, looking forward to work,” said Dipin Kasana, a millennial and director of business analytics for JLL. “One of the most important things that have kept me engaged in this organization are the learning and growth opportunities. Look for organizations that can help train you in different skills and provide you with a roadmap of what your career will look like.”
Employers, who need to hire facility professionals, are also looking for certain things, and some of them dovetail with what millennials and Generation Z are looking for. Soft skills are also an important area that prospective facility managers should embrace.
“A concern of employers is not just the technical skills that the candidate comes in with, but whether they’re able to communicate to the C-suite,” Cahill said. “Do they have a higher level of thinking and problem-solving ability? You have to train people to do that. Certainly a college education strengthens communication skills and enhances critical thinking.”
What Has Already Been Done?
Industry organizations, like BOMA International, IFMA, and the IFMA Foundation, have all worked to recruit younger facility and property professionals. Degree program development is a long-term strategy. It’s a valuable one because it gives employers a base of FM grads to recruit from and allows students to ensure they’ve covered all of the basics academically before entering the workforce.
In the short term, strategies like the IFMA Foundation’s FM Career Ambassador Kit can also be helpful. This tool is free to download and gives users a simple template to use when they speak to groups about facility careers—potentially sparking interest the same way Barba experienced. “The burden is on us who are part of the profession to find time and put some effort into it,” Espiritu said. “We get to be in front of these people, tell the story, and provide guidance to them.”
How Can Current Facility Managers Find New FM Talent?
Facility management is a great field to work in, Thomas-Johnson explained. “We’re always needed no matter what—a pandemic, a fire, a flood, a stock market crash—it doesn’t matter,” she said. “Facility managers are always needed, and this profession has been that lifeboat profession. We’ve survived all of those things.”
Recruiting new facility and property professionals starts with telling that story. It also requires an adjustment for people who are in charge of hiring new FMs. Consider these five tips for hiring and retaining younger talent.
1. Be ready to provide guidance. “If you’re a senior FM and you’re already gunning for succession, you should provide some kind of guidance to younger people, and that should start from listening to the young person,” Espiritu said. “What are your aspirations? What do you want to do in the next five to 10 years? Guided by that level of interest, [the senior FM] should intentionally guide this young individual in many aspects of the work, like the use of technology, how to collaborate with different stakeholders, and how to address difficult questions that relate to risk.” Have an open-door policy to help ensure younger FMs are ready to rise through the ranks, Espiritu added.
2. Support and develop programs in facility management and construction management in local colleges and universities. In smaller organizations, the facility manager may also be the person supervising construction, so a construction program can potentially be a source of future facility managers, Cahill noted. Workforce development programs can also be a source of talented people looking for a viable career.
3. Look beyond the resume. “Be flexible,” advised Thomas-Johnson. “Look to interview people, as opposed to just looking at their resume and saying, ‘Oh, they don’t have a lot of experience’ or ‘They only have one year in the workforce.’ If you really want to get people who are going to be engaged, are willing to come in at an entry level, and want to be in this profession, you need to go beyond their resume. Oftentimes, you find those jewels.”
4. Change the requirements you’re asking for. You may not get enough resumes to review in the first place if you’re asking for too much experience for an entry-level position, Kasana said. Consider asking for one to two years of experience instead of three or more. This will allow young people and recent graduates to enter the industry. You can even provide an internship that can transition into a full-time position to grow young professionals further.
5. Tell the story of FM. Opportunities abound in this profession. Whether you’re recruiting new talent or working to keep the entry-level employees you have, share part of your own story. How did you get into the field? What keeps you there? “FM is a field where you get to combine and learn about a lot of different types of skills,” Barba said. “That’s something that attracts a lot of people. Sometimes people get scared by, ‘Oh, I’m going to be doing this for the rest of my life.’ With FM, I’m completely fine with it because I’m going to be doing something different every single day.”
