# The Building Code Profession Is Dying Out, and That's a Problem



## mark handler

http://www.citylab.com/work/2017/02...sion-is-dying-out-and-thats-a-problem/515826/
Many of the officials who check construction plans and inspect buildings for safety are on the cusp of retirement—and they’re not being replaced.

At professional events, George Williams is used to being surrounded by people many decades his senior. The Salt Lake City-area building inspector is 34, which makes him a young gun in an aging workforce.
His role as the lone youth among venerable peers began when he first started attending professional networking and training events in 2010. Williams would walk into a continuing education course or an event held by the local chapter of the International Code Council (ICC) and he’d be one of the few people without gray hair.
“Without fail, I was the youngest person in the room, every single time,” says Williams. “Not slightly younger, but dramatically younger than nearly everyone else.”
In early 2014, his curiosity piqued, Williams asked the Utah Division of Occupational and Professional Licensing if he could view their records on the demographics of the state’s building code professionals. The department wouldn’t give him names or addresses, but it emailed him a spreadsheet with the ages of every building inspector in the state.
A crisis in numbers
Upon crunching the numbers, Williams found a looming crisis. It turns out that 60 percent of the statewide industry is close to retirement. And Utah isn’t an outlier, as he found a few months later when the ICC and the National Institute of Building Sciences released a report with disturbingly similar findings. “It comes as little surprise that the current workforce is aging and making plans for retirement,” the authors write. “However, the actual numbers are a bit alarming.”
That’s putting it mildly. Eighty-five percent of the respondents to ICC’s survey were over the age of 45. Only three percent were under 35. Most of them were looking to get out of the game in the near future: Eighty percent planned to retire within 15 years, and a full 30 percent within five.
Building code officials can serve as managers, plan reviewers (checking construction plans to make sure they’re up to par), or inspectors—or they can wear two or three of those hats at once. Inspectors are tasked with ensuring that new buildings (and renovations of old ones) have been built safely and responsibly. They carefully check that everything is braced and wired and insulated to meet the requirements of the local codes.

It also isn’t the most glamorous field of all time. “There aren’t any grade-school children right now who are drawing pictures or writing papers about becoming a building inspector,” Williams says. “I think this profession finds you rather than you finding it.”
Like many of his compatriots, Williams found the job through the building trades. Historically, people have gravitated from the trades to codes work because it’s steadier than construction, which is more vulnerable to the boom and bust of the real estate cycle.
The career wasn’t one Williams intended to pursue at first. He started attending community college for construction management. When he got a job with a local engineering firm, they asked him to get further training so he could do building inspections for them. It took him two more years to get fully certified, but even then, it didn’t seem like a long-term career.
“It thought it would just be a chapter,” says Williams. “But in 2008 the economy was down, construction was down. The thought of entering a construction company as the low man on the totem pole was not very appealing. The stability did become appealing at that point.”
Most code official positions are in state and local government. Williams is unusual, in that he worked first for an engineering firm and now for a building code consulting firm. By his estimate, 90 percent of people in the industry are employed in the public sector; both of his employers have received much of their work from government entities.
The industry is having a hard time attracting new recruits in part because the stability that attracted Williams is no longer the norm. The public sector took a beating after the Great Recession, with the number of government employees plummeting after the downturn and taking far longer to recover than private-sector employment did. Pay for those who remained actually fell. The benefits that compensate public workers for lower pay are coming under threat, too.


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## mark handler

The industry is having a hard time attracting new recruits in part because the stability that attracted Williams is no longer the norm.
“During the downturn, cities were laying off some of their building department staff who had been there for 15 or 20 years,” says Williams. “That historical sense that working for the local government is an incredibly secure job went out the window. The sense of permanence is no longer there. That’s been detrimental to those switching careers [from the private sector].”
Countering the retirement wave
The ICC is trying to stave off an inspector shortage. It sponsors a program in technical high schools that teaches students in major construction trades—like electrical, plumbing, and mechanical—how to navigate the code. The program “incorporates a hands-on component to allow students ... to directly apply what they learn in the code book to an actual construction project,” the ICC’s vice president of membership, Ron Piester, writes in an email. The idea is to both improve code compliance and make the pipeline from the trades to codes roles more explicit. The organization has also launched an initiative to improve recruitment and formed an emerging leaders council.
In Utah, the regional manager of Williams’ company reached out to the department of licensing and proposed an educational program to train more inspectors. The state already uses 1 percent of building permit fees to pay for continuing education for contractors and inspectors. Williams and his colleagues got $30,000 of it. They used that slim outlay to develop a test-prep series with 41 two-hour sessions spread over two years. So far, 36 people have been licensed through the program. (Inspectors are certified by the ICC and licensed by their state.)
They didn’t stop there. This spring, Williams’s company will launch an online Building Code Academy, which will offer test prep and training videos at $200 a course. The company has hired four inspectors under the age of 35 in Utah, and more in California.
Still, Williams is worried for the future of his industry. He believes that without returning to an employment paradigm closer to the pre-recession norm, the retirement cliff will continue to loom. It used to be that jurisdictions would hire a junior inspector to train under a senior inspector, whom they would eventually replace. Now that they want to do more with less, those junior inspectors aren’t getting hired.
“The cities are trying to have smaller building departments and trying to accomplish more work with less people,” Williams says. “As a result of that, the cities aren’t willing to invest in an individual who does not have the training and experience. That’s where this gap has grown.”


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## JCraver

This is good for me.  I've got ~20 years left.  If all you guys would hurry up and retire, I can be making some *bank*.


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## Rick18071

You don't make much different pay than a carpenter around  here. Per inflation I made more as a factory worker 30 years ago. We become an inspectors once out backs and knees give out and can no longer do the manual work. That's why we are all old and will it will continue to be elders in this profession.


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## fatboy

Colorado Chapter Board has been talking about this for years. They are currently developing and outreach/mentoring program to work with high schools to identify and help grow students to come into the building trades and inspection. It will be interesting watching it develop.


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## JCraver

Rick18071 said:


> You don't make much different pay than a carpenter around  here. Per inflation I made more as a factory worker 30 years ago. We become an inspectors once out backs and knees give out and can no longer do the manual work. That's why we are all old and will it will continue to be elders in this profession.




Oh, I know.  I made more money swinging a hammer no doubt.  But today, I get to go home at 5:00 and forget this place even exists until Monday morning.  Hard to put a price on that.


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## JCraver

fatboy said:


> Colorado Chapter Board has been talking about this for years. They are currently developing and outreach/mentoring program to work with high schools to identify and help grow students to come into the building trades and inspection. It will be interesting watching it develop.




Our ICC chapter does a couple scholarships every year, for kids going into trades/engineering, and inspection programs.  I don't know if it's helping, but we get several applications every spring.


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## tmurray

JCraver said:


> This is good for me.  I've got ~20 years left.  If all you guys would hurry up and retire, I can be making some *bank*.


35 here....


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## linnrg

Other Points: The contractors also cry because there is no good "young" help.  I see the young want to look at phones all the time.  I hear complaints that they want to only work certain days. the young are not allowed to work at the young ages we got to. The schools are not promoting the trade side of life but they are promoting the college side.  My friend who teaches a construction academy tells me his students start out good but trickle off by just not showing up regularly (motivation),  And then there are the social problems like not being able to show up to work because they went to jail.

From the public sector: Pension programs have been drawn back to where new hires get a program similar to the 401k and some might get contributions to that but if so it is very minor.  Wages still are steady but until you have tons of time in you probably still make less that the private side.

I agree with Rick18071 - I wish my legs were still good.  I also remember making some money (a couple of times) back in the day.  Once was when I worked about 8 months straight without even one day off.  There still are jobs that can pay but you may have to go to a remote place (done that too),

I do not know about other areas but up here one of our major industries (oil/gas) has been down - and that has slowed down other things like commercial work.  I talk to private side guys who openly ask how they can get into my job because they are either scared of losing their present job or have already lost it.


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## Pcinspector1

Sent the local Vocational school the latest info on the ICC's Code Counts, Training Tomorrows Construction Professions Program, all I hear is cricket sounds. Looks like the starting pay range average is around $18-24 unless your in an area with a higher COL. A college kid just out would have trouble paying back his/her loans being an inspector.


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## linnrg

Although I am not really looking I usually hover over all of the jobs that mmarvel posts and find that the fact is our industry is not that high of pay - some areas are terribly low. And what pcinspector1 says is true.  We have some young people in our office who are still under the burden of student loans - the result there is they are not able (or they think they are not able) to contribute to retirement plans.


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## JCraver

linnrg said:


> ... our industry is not that high of pay - some areas are terribly low. .....



Amen.

But, if all the "old guys" retire, some of the higher paying jobs that are out there will open up.


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## Pcinspector1

jcraver,

I think the old money goes into the pool and admin gobbles it up for a pay raise and an assistant! 

That's how gooberment works!


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## JCraver

I know, I know.

Man, you guys are sure ruining this dream for me.  Here I am thinking I'm actually gonna' make some decent money one of these days, and you guys are raining all over it!!


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## tmurray

JCraver said:


> Amen.
> 
> But, if all the "old guys" retire, some of the higher paying jobs that are out there will open up.


The other thing to keep in mind is that if there is a lack of qualified enforcement in the industry, this will cause an increase in salaries as well. It's all about supply and demand.


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## Pcinspector1

Don't forget about the third party inspection programs that are popping up. Some City's may eliminate their city inspection departments and go with independent inspections.


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## fatboy

For larger jurisdictions, third-party continues to be too expensive around here. Smaller ones yes, it might be a viable alternative.


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## ICE

Los Angeles County needs to hire a boatload of inspectors before July when all contractors are supposed to be replaced with union employees.  That's for new construction, rehab and code enforcement.  Thirty might not be enough. Management level jobs are open also.


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## steveray

Unfortunately "legally" qualified and actually qualified are too far apart from what I see and the municipalities don't care about actually being qualified.....


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## Pcinspector1

Not enough "Tiger's" to go around I suspect!


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