Projections of a loss of 37% of water utility workers in the next decade have many water utility managers concerned.
The current average age of water utility workers is 44.7, about four years younger than the average age of all other workers in the nation. The average retirement age for utility personnel is 56, according to the Water Environment Research Foundation/American Water Works Research Foundation study Succession Planning for a Vital Workforce in the Information Age.
To that end, many utilities have established internships. The programs are mutually beneficial: students get that much-needed on-the-job experience that also helps them determine whether they indeed want a career in water. Water utilities get an opportunity to see a student in action and offer the rising stars employment.
Although the goals of internship programs are pretty consistent among water utilities that have them, their structure can vary.
In 2006, the San Diego County Water Authority, in California, in concert with regional water agencies, community colleges, and private-sector partners, developed a water and wastewater internship program to meet the increased demands for qualified staff. When the program began, many of the San Diego County Water Authority’s member agencies had a large number of employees nearing or reaching retirement eligibility, notes Stacey Rule, who manages the intern program.
“The program was started to help fill anticipated voids by providing hands-on experiences for students at two local community colleges, Cuyamaca and Palomar,” he says. “The program offers a great opportunity for students to demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and abilities in the water/wastewater industry to jumpstart their careers.”
In the 2014–15 program year, 11 interns were selected from among 138 applications by an internship selection committee composed of representatives of public and private water and wastewater agencies and local community colleges. Once chosen by the internship committee, the intern commits to a maximum 20-hour work week for 33 weeks. Each participating agency pays interns $10 per hour for the time worked with its agency. A staffing company administers payroll for most of the participating agencies.
Interns are required to submit to a security background check, possess a valid California driver’s license, and have the ability to maintain insurability under agencies’ vehicle insurance policy. They also must pass a pre-employment physical and satisfactory employment authorization documentation.
“Because these internships are paid positions by host agencies, interns are expected to meet the same hiring requirements as other job applicants, including background checks and physicals,” explains Rule. “This process also is important because interns are assigned to a variety of tasks such as operation of vehicles and equipment.”
Interns attend water/wastewater technology courses at Cuyamaca College or Palomar College while gaining experience and earning pay during the day working at various water and wastewater agencies in the San Diego region, spending eight weeks in four different modules.
“The program typically runs August to May in coordination with academic schedules,” says Rule. “The four modules consist of system maintenance, system operations, water treatment, and wastewater treatment.”
Each participating member agency assigns mentors to interns during the eight-week training period with its agency. “These subject matter experts provide guidance and hands-on training to the interns. The program typically requires one mentor per student,” explains Rule.
Mentors are required to complete an evaluation form at the end of each module. “Evaluations provide feedback to interns about opportunities for development and growth, and they also are used to make sure that interns are ready to move to the next module,” says Rule.
Interns are required to work at a satisfactory performance level and maintain a grade of C or higher in college coursework to remain in the program for both semesters. More than 83% of interns go on to find jobs in the industry.
Rule says he’d like to see the program expand. “Typically, we receive almost 300 applications each year for 15 to 20 spots,” he says.
Saul Zavala secured a spot with the San Diego County Water Authority from 2013–14. Zavala, who now is a full-time utility and maintenance technician for the San Dieguito Water District, says he did the internship to gain experience “and I knew it would make me more valuable, therefore increasing my chances of getting hired. Being an intern looks good on paper. Also . . . it was paid, so why not?”
Zavala’s internship exposed him to many facets of the water industry, including water treatment, wastewater treatment, system operations, and system maintenance and construction. “It definitely let me know what I like and do not like,” he says. “By the end of the internship, I was sure as to what field I was interested in.”
For Zavala, the most challenging part of the internship was the required commuting. “I was placed far away from home water districts,” he says. Zavala’s favorite part of the internship was Rule’s mentoring. “He was definitely of great help throughout the internship,” says Zavala. “He is very amiable, approachable, and knowledgeable.”
Third-Party Agencies
In 2013, the Long Beach Water Department (LBWD) in California initiated a pilot internship program for students to gain experience and develop the community’s workforce. The program aims to bring valuable and high-quality paid water industry internship opportunities to college students for whom classroom education is not enough.
The pilot program started with one intern; its success was the driving factor in expanding the number to 10 in 2014. “It became popular and was a real success,” says Ken Bott, administrative officer for the Long Beach Water Department.
The interns have provided more than 4,000 work hours to the Long Beach Water Department across all departments.
LBWD partners with Pacific Gateway Workforce Investment Network, a public agency that connects job seekers to employment. The interns are on the Pacific Gateway payroll, which also handles Worker’s Compensation. Pacific Gateway charges back the cost to LBWD.
The interns’ hourly wages range from $10–$12, depending on the position. “We have some that are engineering-type positions that might pay more and some that are entry-level facilities maintenance kind of positions as well,” adds Bott.
LBWD also has partnered with various recruitment agencies such as Long Beach Job Corps and Long Beach City College. “We tailor our recruitment to find the best candidate or get a good candidate pool depending on what kind of position we are looking for,” says Bott.
The internship program begins by various LBWD departments such as facilities maintenance, warehouse, engineering, administration, accounting, and fleet services providing input regarding their respective needs.
“We ask managers if they have a need for an intern who can come in and work on a project—not just scan documents, but do actual work where they would learn something and they would get that work product as well,” says Bott.
For instance, if fleet services needs a mechanic, Bott and his team prepare a flyer for the Long Beach Job Corps or Long Beach City College automotive programs to let them know of the internship opportunities, instructing intern applicants to send their resume to Pacific Gateway, which serves as the gatekeeper.
Pacific Gateway reviews the resumes and sends them to LBWD for review. “We hold an interview with those who are interested in the internship opportunities and see if they’re a good fit for us and likewise,” says Bott, adding that successful interns are placed in the department appropriate to their interests.
The Long Beach Water Department also had a partnership with Los Angeles County’s Transitional Subsidized Employment (TSE) program, which transitions welfare recipients into temporary employment. LBWD had three TSE interns for eight-month internships, one of whom went on to take a permanent job in the city.
LBWD does not rotate the interns around the different departments, although an intern may engage in various arms within a department, such as engineering, where the intern may learn about sewer construction as one of the branches.
Bott says, “We work hard with our interns to give them work they can put on their resume,” he adds. “When we meet with the managers, we make sure they understand the internship program is not just about grunt work—it’s for them to learn a skill, learn something new, do a project, do something they can be proud of when they leave and not just say ‘For eight weeks I made photocopies’.”
The eight-week internship can be extended. “Every once in a while, a student will start in June and when the internship is up, there’s still a little summer left. Based on their school schedule, they can continue through the fall. We’ll accommodate that and extend the internship program accordingly,” says Bott.
“But we don’t like to make this a permanent internship,” adds Bott. “The internship is there for them to learn. We get some work product out of it. They can put it on their resume and they move on. We don’t want something that’s going to last a year, two years.”
Still, internships are of value to water utilities in finding potentially valuable employees, points out Bott. “We have, in the past, tried to recruit for somebody at a civil engineer level and it’s very difficult to find somebody who has utility—and specifically water sector—experience and/or education in water mechanics,” he says. “Taking somebody from the internship and growing them has worked really well.”
LBWD director of finance Paul Fujita supervises intern Elvira Manzo (right).
From Intern to Department Leader
Dennis Santos is a civil engineer with LBWD, overseeing the water utility’s Engineering Development Service Counter, handling all water- and sewer-related inquiries and requests with the help of other engineers.
Nine years ago, Santos was an engineering intern with LBWD, before the water department launched its recent formal internship program. His experience led to an offer of a full-time position after his graduation from California State University–Long Beach in June of 2007.
Santos says he pursued the internship to gain the hands-on experiences that weren’t offered in classroom settings. “I was also not entirely certain at the time of the field of civil engineering that I would pursue and thought an internship opportunity would help me choose and make that important decision,” notes Santos.
During his internship, Santos assisted with drafting letters, preparing reports, and verifying engineering-related calculations. He assisted with the tabulating and organizing of data related to water and sewer engineering projects. Santos also was responsible for maintenance and updating of the record drawing database. He also attended coordination meetings with the project engineers.
“The internship gave me an idea of what an engineer working for LBWD actually does,” says Santos. “I witnessed how much involvement an engineer would have on his or her project—from planning, to design, construction, and project completion—and I became very interested.”
There were a few challenges for Santos—chief among them was figuring out how to balance his work and school schedule during midterms, finals, and project due dates. Still, his supervisors and other engineers at LBWD were very accommodating, he notes.
His favorite part of the internship was each time he successfully completed an assignment or project and received important feedback from the engineers.
“Dennis is a very good example of somebody who came on board learning to become an engineer,” says Bott. “He gained experience in the water industry as well as specifically to Long Beach Water. He grew from that and is now a civil engineer after many years. It worked out as a really good example of the power of internships.”
Internships also present a valuable applicant pool, adds Bott.
“We already know them,” he says. “There’s not a need to go out and get a list of eligible candidates if you’re just looking through resumes and names and you don’t really know the person. With an internship, you’ve had an opportunity to view them at work. It’s like an extended period of probation. The great thing is they do a great job for us and when you can put a face to a name, it works really well.”
In setting up the internship, there was an assumption that it would take a lot of effort on the part of the supervisors and mentors, which turned out not to be the case, says Bott. “These interns caught on quickly,” points out Bott. “We do a poll at the end of the mentoring and they say about 30% of their time was dedicated to teaching and 70% of the time, the interns were doing work. That was a lot different than what I thought it was going to be.
“Once the students understood what they needed to do, they got to work and actually gained some good work experience. It wasn’t just job shadowing. That was something we didn’t want. We wanted them to go beyond just watching someone else perform their skill. We want them to get some hands-on experience and they definitely do.”
Each intern is assigned one or two mentors. Interns meet twice a week to discuss their progress with their supervisors and others in the department.
“We have conversations with them to see how things are going and give them pointers and feedback,” says Bott. “In some circumstances where there might be an issue, it’s a great opportunity to mentor them. A lot of these students are young and we have an opportunity to tell them that while they might be able to be late for school, when they’re working with an employer, that’s not going to work. We’ll work with them on attendance and other issues.”
Bott says if there’s been any drawback to the Long Beach Water Department’s internship program, it’s logistics.
“It’s been a really popular program—we went from one to 10,” he points out. “When we had those 10, we had space issues. We had a little bit extra work for IT to get computers set up and other things we weren’t anticipating because we weren’t expecting that many.
“As folks said they needed an intern, the next question is ‘Do you know where this person is going to work? They need a computer, they need a desk.’ You need to be prepared to answer those questions in order for it to be a success because you only have eight weeks.”
An internship can be a poor experience for a student if nothing is ready for them upon their arrival, points out Bott.
High School Students
While many water utility programs offer college internships, some are geared toward high school students. Case in point: the Palm Bay (Florida) Utilities Department has an internship program for students at Heritage High School’s Academy of Environmental Water Technology Program (AEWTP) to provide them with the necessary training to become water industry professionals.
The program focuses on training students to become certified water treatment operators and enables students to graduate high school with their Level C Water Operator Pre-Licensure coursework. Students take the Florida Department of Environmental Protection’s Level C Water Operator test at the end of their senior year.
Karyn Barber, a former college advisor, is outreach coordinator for the program. The goal of the program, she says, is to give students in the AEWTP hands-on experience. “That hopefully results in them passing the licensing exam and maybe even coming to work here. As people retire, we’re going to need more skilled and trained young people,” says Barber.
Because one does not need to go to college to pass the Level C operator exam, Palm Bay Utilities’ internship program “is a good fit for those students who are maybe not college-driven and are going to be more focused on a career out of high school,” she adds.
For the utility, the benefit is in “the hope of finding local students who want to continue to be a part of the utility and give back in the sense that they’re going to work here, they live here, they grew up here—that kind of ownership that goes into it,” she adds.
Palm Bay Utilities pays its interns $10.23 an hour; they work 20 hours a week for six weeks. The interns follow a curriculum set up for a six-week period that includes 2.5 weeks each at the city’s reverse osmosis and lime softening plants where they are under the guidance of the plants’ superintendents.
Students have learned about water quality testing and have done filter changes. “Each day, there are different activities that they’re doing,” says Barber, adding that the activities follow the typical day in a water utility.
The students also have a curriculum that is augmented by the training they need on items that they will be asked about on the operator license exam. At the end of the day, the students review questions with superintendents, who essentially serve as mentors.
In addition to spending time at the two plants, student interns tour other local plants to get them exposed to how other utilities operate, Barber says. The plan this year is to tour water utility plants in Melbourne and Cocoa Beach, FL.
A new feature of the program this year is spending half-day rotations through some of the other departments within the utility, such as engineering, GIS, distribution, and collection.
“We do that at the end with the thought they’ve spent the whole summer going through that operator part of the job, which is what they’re being prepared for in that exam they’re going to take, but some of them get to the end of the internship and discover that’s not what they want to do,” says Barber. “We’re trying to expose them to some other ways they can be involved with the city and with the utilities.”
Palm Bay Utilities’ superintendents also teach the interns the importance of plant safety.
“There are a lot of different things such as chemicals and working at different heights that they’re being trained on,” says Barber. “Their access is limited because they are high school students, but I think it’s a valuable part of the program for them to understand the reality that there are things you need to be thinking through and you need to be trained well. Training is important.”
Students do an exit interview in which they offer feedback on how to enrich the program. Barber is endeavoring to teach the interns additional skills, such as networking and resume writing.
Palm Bay Utilities is in its third year of the internship program. Two interns went through it the first year. In 2014 and this year, the number doubled to four. To date, none of the interns have gone into full-time work for the utility. Most of them have chosen to go on to college. That can be a drawback for utilities that put time and financial resources into a program that may not guarantee the student will later become an employee.
But that isn’t necessary a negative, points out Barber.
“It’s been a positive experience for everybody here that’s been a part of it,” she says. “Everybody I’ve spoken to feels like this is a valuable program and the students who have come through the program seem to have at least benefitted from it in the sense that they got that professional working environment experience. Even though we haven’t directly put them back into our system, that doesn’t mean they haven’t learned some valuable things for later on down the road.”
Summing Up
Rule’s advice to water utilities looking to set up an internship program is to obtain “support from upper management, a well-developed plan and ample staff to facilitate the program. A strong partnership with local colleges also is critical.”
Bott concurs that community partnerships are vital when starting an internship program.
“We’ve had some really good partners with the Long Beach Unified School District, with the community college and the state college around us as well as Long Beach Job Corps,” says Bott. “Taking advantage of those opportunities and brainstorming with them to make this work was really key. Trying to go at this alone would have failed, but we had a lot of support.”
Utilities also should start small, he advises.
“Have a few interns because those become your success stories that you can build upon,” adds Bott.
Those like Zavala who have had internships say the hands-on experience is invaluable and utilities should allow interns to have more privileges and more hands-on experience, such as driving vehicles.
Santos echoes that.
“The job exposure will certainly assist the student interns to decide on what field or type of work they would pursue once they finish school,” he adds.
