The loss of human capital in the last few years is not unique to just transportation agencies. It is a trend across the board in both the public and private sectors, caused by the mass exit of the Baby-Boomer generation due to retirement. At Caltrans, we have prepared for this hit to the workforce through a comprehensive succession-planning program that prepares younger employees for a leadership role in every area of the department, from administration to executive-level positions. We collaborate with California State University, Sacramento, to provide quality curriculum. In addition, Caltrans supports mentoring programs, such as the Cypress Mandela Training Center in Oakland, which offers a 16-week pre-apprenticeship program for Bay Area men and women over 18 years old and prepares them for skilled trades jobs in the construction industry.

Yes, the State of California has been hit extremely hard by the nation's struggling economy. We are fortunate, however, that in 2006 the voters approved a $19.9 billion transportation bond that has fueled construction in the last couple of years. And now, we are on-track to use $2.6 billion for streets and highways in federal stimulus that will put more people to work. While our State budget is in bad shape, Caltrans has been fortunate in that we are a special fund agency -- meaning we are funded by gas tax dollars that do not go through the State's general fund. Therefore, the department has been able to maintain its hiring levels.

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I am turning over my “expert” responsibilities to Chris Simmons, chair of ACT’s Next Authorization Task Force and a former state DOT employee, to respond to this week’s question:

I am going to start with an “Amen!” to the anonymous Hill staffer who posted through Lisa.  I could not agree more with his statements and agree more than wholeheartedly with his assessment of state DOT work.  I believe, as the staffer does, that there is a cadre of folks who are interested in government service of this type.  However, as long as the structure of these state DOTs rewards service over ability, longevity over accountability for results, and rigid processes over the ability to respond to the need, we will never reach this pool of talented, young professionals that we deserve to have in government service.  Instead, we will find them in other capacities, such as associational advocacy roles and other non-governmental outlets, that fill their need to participate.  Since the staffer stated this point so clearly, let me bring in a couple of other points to the conversation.

Those in their 20’s and 30’s, including engineers, were educated much differently than previous educational generations.  We were given group assignments, expected to learn how to work as an individual within a group setting, and rewarded for both creating solutions AND maintaining group cohesiveness.  While the private sector can adjust work norms to meet those different expectations, it is very difficult to make that cultural adjustment within a bureaucratic environment.  Not only does the chain of responsibility not allow much freedom to be able to work with those different norms, but those freedoms that do exist are even more constrained by union and civil service rules that have been in place since the Ice Age (or the 1960’s, whichever came first).  Federal and state agencies must give management an ability to adjust performance reviews and unit work norms to be able to adjust to this new reality based on worker expectations.

I would also point out that transportation is much more than engineering, but we have not set up our agencies to reward alternate educational backgrounds.  There is also a place for the environmental, planning, legal, and sociological disciplines, yet only engineers are rewarded within the ranks.  As a non-engineer, I found that my career path was nearly non-existent given the sorts of positions that were available to me based on educational background alone.  And in bringing my policy, legal, and planning context to the table when talking with engineers, it felt like I needed a Rosetta stone for communication with them.  There are very different languages in use in the service of transportation ends, and we do not have structures in place to account for them.  If we are going to move the transportation field into a contextual, multidisciplinary realm that takes into account environmental, community design, and societal concerns, the agencies that are responsible for implementing the solutions must be staffed with individuals who are trained, educated, and conversant in those fields.

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The FAA, in a memo written by its own manager at Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center, admits that a loss of human capital and empty chairs in front of the radar scopes at Denver TRACON has forced it to restrict the flow of traffic into busy, growing, capacity-blessed Denver International Airport. That means flight delays, caused by FAA mismanagement of the controller staffing crisis which included imposed work rules and pay cuts on Labor Day 2006 that caused a surge in attrition far beyond FAA's projections and left the country's busiest air traffic facilities woefully short of experienced controllers.

Nearly one-third of all controllers are newly hired and in training. That's double what it was earlier this decade, according to the DOT IG. The total number of experienced controllers has reached a 16-year low and hundreds more are eligible to retire today and are holding on only for the hope of seeing the Obama Administration fix our labor situation. The lack of experienced controllers has left the FAA scrambling to move today's traffic safely and efficiently -- what we call the "NowGen" that is being neglected as the agency goes recklessly forward with an ill-planned "NextGen" system.

Here's what the Denver FAA manager wrote: "The TRACON (Terminal Radar Approach Control) has indicated that the loss of a large number of their experienced employees, the relative inexperience of many of their current controllers, and the increase in volume has created a situation that they can no longer accept. They have indicated that the volume issues created by eight different routes flowing into their airspace routinely creates situations that put their controllers at risk, and they are unable to provide the level of service our customers deserve."

Denver is not alone. Because of the FAA's imposed work rules and pay cuts, there is a financial disincentive for experienced controllers to transfer to busier facilities. That's not just NATCA's view. It's the view of the DOT IG as well, which reported last June that, "From April 2004 to December 2007, the number of transferring veteran controllers decreased by nearly 34 percent (from 1,217 in 2004 to 808 in 2007)." As a result, the FAA is having to put new hires into busy facilities and this is causing a myriad of problems. At New York TRACON, where controller Patrick Harten worked US Airways Flight 1549 and Capt. Sullenberger in January, there has not been even ONE trainee who has successfully completed training in the past three years. Things are so bad in California that the DOT IG looked into the situation at the request of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. We are anxiously awaiting the imminent release of that report.

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I was interested in the posting that quoted the comments of a Hill staffer, who had served as a civil engineer at a state transportation department.  His experience was quite different from mine, and, in some ways, more relevant.  I am a lawyer, not a civil engineer, and my only service at a state transportation department was as its chief executive officer, not as a career professional.  My work with young civil engineers at the Connecticut Department of Transportation in the early 1990s suggested that the range of their experiences was quite varied, depending on the quality of work assigned to them, the responsibilities that they were given, and the mentoring that they received.  However, the Hill staffer's comments demonstrated that, as Steve Heminger noted so well, if transportation and transportation planning agencies are going to attract and nurture the most talented young people, these agencies will have to define their missions in a manner relevant to the challenges of the 21st century.  Moreover, they will have to develop cultures in which these young professionals are provided with stakes in those missions.  Thus, I believe that the human capital challenge, which has been the subject of the National Journal's transportation blog this week, is intimately involved in the need to develop new goals and purposes for transportation agencies, resting on the economic, environmental, and energy challenges that the Nation now faces. 

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When it comes to ushering in “next generations,” we’re obviously better at technology than people. That this week’s question has engendered a smaller response than any previous week’s question speaks volumes: Nobody really wants to spend any time thinking about the human resources dimension. Normally I’d take comfort in knowing that we’ll get around to fixing this problem just the way we get around to fixing all our other problems: when it becomes a crisis of historic proportions. The problem with human resources is that we don’t have a reliable crisis meter. How will we know when the public service is in meltdown? Or is it already there?

 A little anecdote might be instructive. About a decade ago, two former DOT assistant secretaries, Charlie Hunnicutt (now a partner with Troutman Sanders) and yours truly decided to stop whining about the Department’s staffing problem and actually do something about it. Because Charlie had served under President Clinton and I under the first President Bush, we thought we could appeal to a broad spectrum of stakeholders. In the interest of making it a manageable project, we decided to focus specifically on DOT’s aviation regulatory staff – the folks in the Office of the Secretary of Transportation who oversee the economic regulation of airlines (as opposed to FAA-style safety regulation). The professionals responsible for economic regulation at that time were still mostly veterans of the Civil Aeronautics Board who had migrated to DOT to perform the surviving functions – licensing, international negotiations, competition analysis, consumer protection, etc. -- after the CAB was abolished at the end of 1984. They included lawyers, financial analysts, economists, international negotiators, and others.

 Charlie and I were in total agreement on the premises: 

 (1) The existing staff members were superb. In fact, there wasn’t a government anywhere on the planet that could match us in terms of longevity, knowledge, and experience.

 (2) The office demographic was a catastrophe waiting to happen. Large numbers of people the industry had relied upon for decades would be mustering out within the next few years with no effective way to replace them.

 (3) The perennial whittling away of the DOT budget had made any semblance of succession planning all but useless. There was very little mentoring or apprenticeship in the office.

Contrary to the popular mythology, we had no difficulty attracting qualified applicants.  I had a drawerful of impressive c.v.'s, many of them unsolicited.  The problem was simply money.  Charlie and I thought the solution was pretty obvious: Get more money for the office to facilitate the hiring of the next generation, and do it before the last generation is all gone.

To ensure the project’s credibility with Congress, Charlie and I went to see none other than “Mr. Aviation” himself -- Congressman Jim Oberstar (D-MN). We had him at hello. He completely embraced the importance of addressing the issue and agreed to join us in meeting with industry.

The airlines were next on our list. The three of us sat down with a large group of airline government affairs representatives – the people who, reasonably enough, complain the loudest when it takes too long to get an application approved. We quantified the problem and described the obvious solution. What we needed, we said, was a commitment from the industry to let the appropriations committees know of the crisis and of the industry’s need to ensure that DOT’s regulatory capability is not allowed to deteriorate. Everyone nodded in enthusiastic agreement.

I am not able to report on whether the industry attempted to make the case for increased appropriations or not.  My guess is that many did.  All I can say is that nothing changed.

Fast-forward to 2001. I show up yet again at DOT in the new Bush Administration and in a new job – Under Secretary for Policy -- with oversight, among other things, of the very same aviation staff. I announce on Day One that one of my top goals would be enlarging our staff of aviation professionals and ensuring an orderly transition to the next generation. Six and a half years later, as I was leaving, I would look back and concede that, on that goal at least, I had utterly failed to deliver. Thanks to continued pressure on the budget and competing priorities – who wants to sacrifice an exciting new initiative on the altar of a personnel problem? – the staff continued to operate as it had for years, with suboptimal numbers of people and dollars.

I’m afraid, after the experience of the last decade, I despair of ever finding a satisfying, comprehensive solution to the problem. It is more likely to be solved incrementally, quietly, and by exception. 

And that leads me to close with a bit of good news. In spite of it all, the aviation staff at DOT, while still too small, is actually doing pretty well. The mean age has probably dropped 20 years since Charlie and I worked on the problem, and the quality of the younger professionals in the office is remarkable.  So is their enthusiasm and dedication.  I’d love to take credit for all that, but the truth is that it’s the professional managers themselves who deserve the credit. As annoyed as they get every time a political appointee tells them to do more with less, they actually do more with less.

But there is a finite limit to how much more they can do with less.  The problem now isn’t age or professional quality or lack of interest in public service; it’s just numbers. If the staff isn’t increased in size, the waiting time for regulatory approvals will necessarily become unacceptable. The industry is scrambling to find ways to become more efficient in response to the prolonged recession, and that will implicate a variety of regulatory requirements.  We need to ensure that DOT is capable of responding in a timely and effective way to these new challenges.  The appropriators in Congress need to take note.

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The answer to the question, of course, is that in the absence of capable management, projects will be poorly run and the nation will get a poor return on transportation investments.  The broader question is "Why can't we attract capable people into public service, including DOT"?

The bottom line is that our society has chosen to rank accomplishment entirely in terms of earnings, to characterize government as incapable and to mythologize “private enterprise”. Until we restore the notion that the common good is a worthy objective, and learn to respect organizations that work towards its realization, we will likely be unsuccessful in attracting capable people to government.  

Not long ago, someone asked me – after listening to my complaints about a major corporation’s failings -- if I would like to have it run like the U. S. Post Office. I responded that the company in question could never manage to take a letter from me in Florida and deliver it to a colleague in California for 43 cents – and if they could improve to that level, I would be very pleased. 

I think the issue for government is as much about leadership as it is about talent. Talent will follow leadership, but capable leaders will not accept bureaucracy. Thus, if the political establishment were willing to appoint talented leaders – who would insist on the freedom to produce results and would be unwilling to accept sub optimal political judgments – I think we would find many more young people willing to follow into public service.

The public is rightfully awash in derision for the limited capabilities, self serving instincts and untruthfulness of many who serve in positions of political leadership. They are there because we are collectively unwilling to reject negative advertising, to read and understand the often complex realities which define major questions, and to choose candidates based on facts rather than ideology. Until the public chooses to educate itself more fully about the issues of the day, participates more actively in the political process, restores respect for intellect, supports competitive compensation for public service and discards its contempt for government, I have little optimism about our ability to attract young talent to government service.

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Perhaps I need to stir the pot a little to get things going. To that end, let's expand our discussion to question whether what some say is the "conservative culture of transportation leadership" can truly lead in an environment that calls for bold new approaches in finance, mobility management, institutional efficiency, and technology. How can state and federal DOT professionals become “mobility managers," and what can Congress and the administration do to foster a more innovative orientation?

This very important post, giving a young professional's take on this week's question, comes to us from Hill staffer who follows transportation policy:

Unlike most graduating civil engineers, I desperately wanted to work for my state’s Department of Transportation despite other high paying offers from well-ranked construction firms.  Graduating just after 9/11, I was willing to sacrifice salary for quality of life, job security, and public service.  However, my idealism was met with skepticism by my professors, who unequivocally believed a job at the state would kill my career aspirations.  They were almost right. 

After three years of working for the state DOT, public service felt more like indentured servitude.  My salary barely kept pace with inflation.  My career path was a long and winding road to another lateral position.  My mentor was a year older than me and wandering the same misguided path.  And, the jokes about lazy DOT workers had long since been amusing.  I didn’t want to spend my career counting down the days until my retirement.  I wanted a job, where I felt accomplished and respected, where my work mattered, and where I was continually challenged – the DOT was not that place. 

Though there are many reasons why younger engineers choose not to enter government work and/or choose to leave, my experiences would have been vastly different with some of the following changes that would have little effect on a state’s shrinking budget: 

§       Universities that encourage state work to graduating engineers – for example, tie internship programs to universities and use younger engineers to recruit at career events

§       State DOTs that actively engage their younger workers – for example, better crafted mentor programs and young professional programs to connect younger workers

§       Clear goal paths without hiring freezes that prevent promotion – for example, management training programs to show a career path and provide new challenges

§       Reward for hard work, despite salary freezes – intelligent, young people gain nothing by sacrificing salary for “the cause,” there is no light at the end of the tunnel.  States need to offer other incentives in lieu of salary – increase loan repayment programs and alternate work schedules

§       An image overhaul to increase pride in the organization – look no further than Army advertisements for how to structure an ad campaign

While I voraciously read articles published by your transportation experts, today’s topic was missing a critical viewpoint.  My generation, engineers in their mid 20s and 30s, are missing – both from the government field and from this article.  The budget crunch has wreaked havoc on our state agencies, but it is not the cause of, or answer to, attracting and retaining engineers.  The first step to filling empty CADD stations is to invest in young engineers by including them in finding a solution.  Where can you find such fabulous, young engineers in DC?    Young Professionals in Transportation -http://ypt.transportation.org

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The fact that government agencies responsible for infrastructure programs lack key management and procurement staff – just at the time that such personnel are sorely needed – means, as Emil Frankel says, that these agencies “are going to have to look to the private sector to supply the program and project management that they lack.”  What is most unfortunate, however, is that some agencies are continuing to make unwarranted investment in retaining extensive in-house engineering capability to perform functions that are not inherently governmental, thereby limiting resources that could be used for management improvements.  Rather than competing directly with the private sector, agencies should shore up their management functions for effective planning, procurement and contract administration, and leave the extensive design work to the private sector.  Such an approach would assure both the management and innovation that our critical infrastructure programs now require.

On my brief return to the Connecticut Department of Transportation (ConnDOT) early last year, to serve as Interim Transportation Commissioner, I was struck by the loss of experienced programmatic and project leadership that the agency's career service had experienced in the thirteen or so years, since I had served there.  The loss of these skills was the result of normal retirements and attrition, early retirement programs, and the inability to fill vacancies, either because of state budget constraints or because of failures to recruit new talent.

Certainly this experience is not unique to Connecticut or to transportation departments, but it seems to me that it is particularly threatening for agencies, charged with planning, designing, building, and managing complicated physical assets and networks.  It causes me to wonder how effective these state and local agencies can be, in meeting the challenge of increasing investment in the Nation's transportation infrastructure and of improving the performance of those systems.  Wise and targeted investments must be at the heart of a transportation program that maximizes economic returns and benefits.  Do transportation agencies, any longer, have the skills and leadership to carry out such a program?

As others have pointed out, there are many reasons for the serious shortfall in human capital in transportation agencies, including a reduced pool of civil engineering and transportation planning graduates and the declining attraction of career public service for many young people.  I believe, however, that there are some steps that could be taken to address this problem --

First, in the short-run, state transportation agencies are going to have to find ways to hold existing skilled leadership among their career employees and, in some cases, to bring back some of those who have already retired.  Certainly, this is no time to implement new early retirement programs, which are, essentially, programs to pay bonuses to the best and most experienced people, if they will agree to leave public service, just as they are most needed.

Second, for now, many public transportation agencies are going to have to look to the private sector to supply the program and project management that they lack through broad and flexible contracts.  Using such public-private arrangements may require changing state procurement laws and practices, and will certainly require that transportation departments have the skills to exercise effective management over these outsourced contractual services.

Finally, the severe economic recession that the Nation now faces provides an opportunity to recruit talented and committed young people to careers in state, regional, and local transportation agencies.  That happened in the 1930s, but it will only happen today, if young people perceive these agencies as exciting places to work and if they are attracted to their missions.  Successful recruitment of new skills is inextricably linked to a redefinition of the goals, and to changes in the cultures, of many of these agencies. 

I am confident that transportation agencies can be more successful, in recruiting talented young people, once the agencies' missions are more broadly perceived to include the linkages between transportation investment and economic growth, community enrichment, energy security, and climate change.

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Thanks to Ken and Emil for suggesting this topic.  I think transportation's human capital problem is related to its message problem.  Those of us in the transportation community often bemoan the fact that the presidential candidates (and those eventually elected president) rarely mention the word "transportation" in their speeches.  This constant complaint is another example of confusing means and ends.  Transportation is a means to maximizing other values, not an end in itself.

While the recent presidential campaign again ignored the word "transportation", the subject area was continually discussed.  The candidates just used different words and phrases like energy security and climate change.  The transportation sector accounts for 2/3 of U.S. petroleum use, and is one of the largest and fastest growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions.  So, if we want to connect better with elected officials about the need for more investment in infrastructure, we should start by using their language.

And, if we want to attract the best and the brightest to transportation planning and engineering careers, we should stop limiting the sales pitch just to concrete, asphalt, and steel (to borrow a phrase from Rodney Slater).  The next generation of leaders is fascinated by the energy and climate challanges.  We need to do a better job of convincing them that the transportation field is the key that can unlock both of those doors.

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Background:

For many years, a collegial group of transportation-oriented professionals in the Washington, D.C. area, known as the "NoName Group," has been meeting from time to time and exchanging views on various transportation-related issues of common interest. A recent comment by one of its members, Emil Frankel, must have hit a responsive chord among his NoName colleagues -- many of whom are former government alumni --  because it prompted a lively email exchange. Emil subsequently wrote to Lisa Caruso suggesting that this might be a useful question to pose on the National Journal Transportation blog. "Several of us," Emil wrote, "who are involved in transportation policy matters (some of whom are on your list of ‘experts’) have been engaged in a very interesting discussion of an under-discussed issue, critical to transportation policy: What are and will be the effects of the extraordinary loss of human capital that transportation agencies at all levels have experienced in the last several years on the Nation’s ability to carry out the significant programs of infrastructure investment that America Needs?" " I realize," Emil continued, " that this is a broader problem in the public sector, not limited to transportation, but it is particularly severe in agencies that are responsible for the design, construction and operation of complicated infrastructure. Are these agencies capable any longer of carrying out major investment programs? Can they spend the stimulus money wisely and effectively?... There are many reasons for this significant loss... Whatever the reasons, we believe that this issue overhangs, and will constrain, the Nation’s response to the infrastructure challenge."

Lisa’s reaction to Emil’s suggestion was an enthusiastic "Yes!" To get the ball rolling, she asked one of the early respondents (Orski, van Beek and Lockwood) to recap the initial exchange. What follows is a brief summary of their initial comments, Subject: "Why can't we attract the best and brightest to highway transportation agencies?"

Steve Lockwood

The attractiveness of any career for a recent grad is based on a combination of factors that make if difficult for many state DOTs to compete for the best and brightest. Young professionals in transportation planning or engineering related orientation are looking for opportunities to become involved in arenas popularly associated with new challenges and issues. These tend to be issues with positive social, political and economic stakes -- or associated with cutting edge technology.

The mainstream highway transportation program career path is widely perceived as low tech, static, bureaucratic. Declining funding, legacy (read "old") programs, invisible leadership tends to further detract from perceived career opportunities. Has there been anything in the recent stimulus discussion related to highways that would appeal to young professionals?

Furthermore, (at least until recently) conditions of employment in state and local DOTs have not been appealing to the best and brightest compared to either the private sector or other public agencies more directly engaged in issues of interest. The recent candidates for the Eno Foundation Leadership Development Conference, representing recognized outstanding university graduates in transportation programs tended to be interested in logistics, non-motorized transportation, finance, land-use and environmental issues -- with few considering highway system development -- from either a technical or managerial career perspective.

Notwithstanding the many exciting challenges that actually face our transportation institutions at all levels in highway development, design, finance, operations, etc., and the heroic leadership in some instances -- we have not been able to capture the interest of the best and brightest.  We have failed to integrate professional education with the real world challenges, lacked effective communication of the stakes and opportunities to the public, and not structured attractive and competitive career options for entry level staff. 

Ken Orski

The shortfall in human capital at state DOT level is actually a reflection of a larger problem:  young Americans have opted out of the engineering and civil service professions. This is evident looking at the composition of the MIT engineering student body  (65 percent foreign) and observing the career path that my own son (age 27) and his friends have chosen. Not a single of his  friends and colleagues from high school or college (nor those of his fiance, for that matter) has chosen a public service career. Their holy grail is going to Harvard Business School (Wharton or Stanford also will do) and then landing a six-digit salary/bonus with a private equity firm or a Wall Street investment bank. The most talented become successful entrepreneurs on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley.  Admittedly, the financial services sector has lost some of its glamour (and career opportunities) but I doubt that the recent economic crisis will have much lasting effect on the decisions of talented young people. It all has to do with the "modestly appealing career opportunities" in the civil service, as Steve Lockwood has tactfully pointed out, and with the prestige and rewards that our society accords to certain pursuits and professions.

Engineering is not among them. Nor is government service. The public sector no longer attracts the best and brightest -- as it did in the FDR and JFK days -- because it is associated with burdensome rules, bureaucratic tedium, lack of opportunity to exercise initiative at lower levels,  and a degree of public scrutiny at higher levels that most people just are not willing to put up with (as the decision of a respected colleague of mine to bow out from an appointment to a senior-level position at U.S. DOT has eloquently demonstrated).

Steve Van Beek

There are two distinct but related points here: 1) attracting the best into our educational institutions and encouraging that they pursue careers in transportation and (2) hiring and attracting them at all levels of government. 

Having been associated with Eno's Leadership Development Conference for a while now, I remain bullish on the talent POTENTIALLY going into our field. The backgrounds, education, and practical experience of our applicants is as good as has been in my 25 years following the industry and education (this year we were a little down in engineers, but last year we were up).  We certainly need more to enter the field.

I'm actually more concerned about the second point -- how do we attract more of the best and brightest into government at all levels?  As the son of two senior civil servants, I have been appalled at how far the prestige of government work has fallen.  At the national level, years of contracting out, attacking civil servants, cutting staffs, and providing little support have surely had their effect and, from what I know, the states are not much better (although there are exceptions).

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