Foremost on the mind of engineers in Nevada is the industry’s workforce. Exacerbated by supply chain issues and an overall challenging field, Nevada engineers are concerned with retaining their team while continuing to grow. Recently, executives representing the engineering industry met at a roundtable sponsored by City National Bank and held in Las Vegas to discuss the challenges they face.
Connie Brennan, publisher and CEO of Nevada Business Magazine, served as moderator for the event. These monthly roundtables bring together different industries to discuss issues and solutions.
Generally speaking, how healthy is this industry?
Joe Laiacona: I think it’s very healthy.
Ed Taney: There’s growth and people coming into the valley and people flocking into the state. There is a lot of opportunity out there.
Cody Taylor: The biggest challenge for us is volume. We have to maintain volume, not just for shareholder purposes, but to keep our family of partners. And right now, it’s still going pretty strong. We’re having good success, but what we see is less acquisition and more asset management services.
Aaron Kraft: It is on the upscale swing that we’ve never seen before. Staffing was always a challenge, but it’s even more challenging. We’re winning more work, providing more work, and we’re worried about burning our employees out. We’re doing everything we can to make sure we can produce good quality work for our clients. With delays in providing equipment and supplies, it does impact [our ability to work]. But our clients in general are not waiting. Is it going to get cheaper two years, five years from now? Highly unlikely. They recognize it’s the cost of doing business. They’re doing a lot of operational efficiencies, looking at streamlining value engineering and seeing where we can provide design aspects that are different, or just challenge the status quo. Can we optimize the system that we have in place? Knowing it’s going to take a year or 18 months for equipment to come in makes it challenging.
Dr. Ken Ackeret: The infrastructure bill has passed that we long waited for; we could have used it back in the Great Recession. It’s pumping money into our industry. There was all the talk about shovel ready. Well, we always talk about pencil ready. [We’re] doing the designs and getting it out to the construction industry and all the things we deal with. Right now, with the type of infrastructure money pushing into the private sector, that’s causing even more pressure on people qualified to do the work. Everybody’s fear is the burn out of the good staff. Our reputations are on the line with that and all that’s going on. It’s a good thing. Then we have all the challenges of delivering.
Kraft: We have never been in the position like this before. We’re having to say, no, we can’t do that for you. We can’t compete, or we can’t provide for you because we have so much work.
Ackeret: Or the answer could be, yes, we can. But here’s the schedule. You may not like it. We can’t today.
What are your staffing challenges?
Taney: It’s been an employee’s market for the past four to five years [and it is] very difficult to obtain and then maintain staff.
Ackeret: Staffing and recruitment is a national problem for engineering, both public and private salaries, everything.
Kraft: Retention is tough. We’ve adapted in our company’s philosophy. We’re finding that, the more we allow our staff to work from home, the more successful we are. And the more we can open the door for other engineers, especially the younger generation, to consider joining our company. That in and of itself is a challenge for some of the old timers, like me. But it has actually opened the door for us to increase our performance. It’s become an asset for us, and it’s attractive [to potential employees].
Greg DeSart: Exasperating [the staffing] challenge is inflation. We are finding that wages are going up rapidly. There’s a lot of turnover because of that. As an organization, we have had to step it up in terms of paying attention to wage trends and being competitive with our wages. Then [we have to consider] how we cover that because we are a for profit organization. We have to turn around and figure out how to recover those extra fees with our clients. Keeping our fees compatible with our expenses is just an ongoing, very dynamic, situation right now, something that we’re paying a lot of attention to. I believe that every challenge is also an opportunity. This is really a great opportunity for firms who are proactive. Firms that do that are going to stay, prosper and do well.
Karen Purcell: It’s a national issue. With our office in Denver, Colorado, we’re facing the same challenges. One thing we did is focus heavily on our company culture. [Last year] we had a session with all of our employees and asked what they want. [From there] we did an overhaul of our benefits and provided incentives for employees to stay five, 10, 15 years, and so forth. Really listening to the employees and hearing what they wanted helped with retention. We have had success with that.
Are young people entering this profession?
Patty Mamola: Historically, it’s been challenging to get people, engineers, to come to Nevada. I don’t know what it is. Even for me, when I was a young engineer, I really struggled [with whether] I really wanted to come to Las Vegas. Las Vegas grows on you after a while but we struggle to get engineers down here in southern Nevada for whatever reason. We have to remember, too, in 2008 when the economy tanked, we lost 60 percent of our engineers and they’re not coming back. There’s a whole segment of the profession that’s gone. We have to recruit those experienced people, those mid, upper-level management, from somewhere else. Even if we have to go international. The [Nevada Board of Professional Engineers] supports that, we have a method to license international applicants. If they’re licensed in a country that’s signatory to one of the mobility agreements, we can license them quickly.
Taney: It’s eroding behind the scenes. At the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), the IT (information technology) world has superseded engineering now. The number of graduates physically coming out of universities is diminishing. These are all challenges that can be overcome. Something kind of fell into our lap. We were advertising [for open positions] nationally and not getting anybody that was going to come to Vegas. We certainly couldn’t get local people. But we ended up with a connection internationally, of all things. It was a gentleman that was coming out with a master’s degree in civil engineering from a different country and we ended up supporting him on his endeavor to get a permanent card green card. That connection blossomed into several more people from that country.
Mamola: There’s a lot of professional organizations [involved in job fairs for recruitment]. We reach out to elementary school girls because if you can catch them in elementary school, they may get into the STEM fields. And we have a shortage of girls. Out of all the graduating engineers, [only] 20 percent of those are women. That’s a problem. Then every ten years after graduation, we lose half of them. By the time you get to be my age there’s about 2 or 3 percent that are women. That’s a whole field that we’re missing out on and it’s a male dominated field. We need to do a better job in retention [for women]. Flex time, allowing them to work for home helps. The board [made a change], instead of having to wait four years after graduation to take the PE (Principals and Practice of Engineering) exam to get licensed, you can now take it any time after graduation. This helps women, especially, that have an interrupted career right after graduation. But we all can do a better job in being empathetic to women and figure out how can we retain them in the workforce. The more women we have, [the more] they’re going to influence their children. Then we may get more children to think about engineering as a career path.
How do you maintain culture in a remote work environment?
Boyd Erickson: We’ve kept everybody in the office. We’ve adapted, though, our office hours. We do four tens and we take off Fridays. So, we give everybody a three-day weekend every week. We found that we need to collaborate, we need to talk, we need to be at each other’s desks. We’re a very hands-on company as far as that goes with our employees, and always have been. Right now, we have no one working from home, everybody’s in the office and we’re working hard; we love it.
Purcell: We’re the same way. We have an in-office culture.
DeSart: We use remote working as a retention tool, especially with the younger engineers. If they don’t have the ability to work remote, they’re going to go work somewhere else where they can. It does erode the company culture, though. That is a challenge that we’re facing, but we’re dealing with it. For example, now we have three offices. We have all hands meetings, but we have them on . We’ll also have company events where we bring people physically to the office, like waffle day where we had waffles in all three offices. That was coordinated throughout the organization. That brings people together, and you act like a family when you’re eating a meal together. We’re forming a focus group with the people who are making a positive influence on the organization to ask them, “What ideas can we get from you about how to get other people to embrace our culture and align with our core values?”
Kurt Goebel: I would add what we’ve done is we’re pretty much in office. In Las Vegas, we’ve got ten folks and, when COVID came, we made it so that they could all work from home. Within two to three weeks, because we were only ten people and we could keep some distance, everybody was back in the office and we’ve been in the office ever since. In our Reno office, we’ve got people that want to work from home and then they come into the office periodically. We make it work however the folks want to work. We make remote an option but we encourage in office because, as some of you have said, collaboration is critical.
Ackeret: That’s what we saw with COVID. We massively moved our staff, in two weeks, totally out of the office. It was a highly profitable and successful year because productivity went up. From a business standpoint, it was fantastic in a lot of ways, but we saw fundamental cracks in the foundation of our culture. The longevity of this will be harmful to the quality of our work, the training of our young staff and everything. During that time period, we had commitments to interns [so] we set up a virtual training internship program to get them involved. Then we were getting new employees, graduates coming in. You can’t bring a young engineer into an office without somebody to supervise them. They can work from home, but what are they going to do? Coming out of COVID, we rolled in our mid-level supervisors that they would be working with. Over time, we essentially have rolled everybody in. [Now employees] have flexibility. If your team knows that you’ve got to meet the plumber at home for the morning, work from home. You have a problem, your child’s sick? Fine, take care of that. We have a lot of mixture of in-person and out-of-office. [Culture] is so important, it’s a natural thing in our engineering environment.
In regard to running out of water for development, how concerned are you?
DeSart: Engineers are built to solve problems. We see these problems as opportunities to fix them. Yes, the lake levels are going down and there’s shortage, but there’s a lot of creative minds coming up with ways to work around that, to continue to allow our economy to thrive and to look at ways to reuse water. Yes, it’s a concern, we can’t ignore it. And in fact, we’re not ignoring it. We’re solving it. We’re coming up with ways to extend the life of this community and to extend the life of Lake Mead. Up in the north, it’s the same thing, the use of groundwater and reuse of water. We will solve it before we run out of water.
Kraft: We’re kidding ourselves if we think that this snow season has made any significant contribution to Lake Mead or Lake Powell, it will be at the same critical level this summer.
Goebel: I was just on Lake Powell and our first day there was the lowest Lake Powell ever was since it was filled. Since then, with all the runoff, it had started coming up to the point where it affected our moorings. They’re projecting Lake Powell to come up 30 feet this year, but that’s just one season. We’ve had decades of decreasing water. We can’t fall into the trap of getting too excited because it’s going to go up. Most likely it’s going to come right back down. And that’s the unfortunate reality that we’re in. As far as Lake Mead goes, we’ve got an intake at the bottom of the lake, so we’re not going to run out of water for quite some time. The challenge is going to be if the water goes below the intakes, then there’s no flow through anymore, we’ve got deadpool and the treatment conditions for the water change. But I’ve heard no real credible threats in terms of us running out of water in the near future; there’s going to be water for Las Vegas for a very long time.
Erickson: That’s where the media has come in and put a little false advertising there. Right now, we use just less than 2 percent of the whole Lake Mead and we recycle 96 percent of that.
Taylor: We have one of the best conservation plans [in the world].
Kraft: Our team designed the drain in the bottom of the bathtub (Lake Mead), and SNWA (Southern Nevada Water Authority) had the foresight to move forward. Las Vegas is going to be in good shape. It’s Arizona and southern California [that are going to challenged]. All those negotiations are going on now. Arizona, for example, took a 27 percent reduction in their water consumption, or in their water delivery. That’s huge in one year. We’re fortunate because of the position that our utilities have put Las Vegas in and how long they’ve been planning for this type of issue.
Taylor: This was news to me, the entire [Las Vegas] valley has perched groundwater. With the influx of water coming through from Lake Mead and what’s being conserved, I don’t know the numbers, but it seems like a really good system.
Erickson: The moratorium the Valley has on evaporative cooling, not being able to use water cooled systems for mechanical systems, [is also a challenge]. As you walk up and down the Strip, you will see many of the buildings, in fact, all the buildings on the Strip use some type of [water] cooling for their buildings. Now we’re trying to be a little bit more creative as far as what we can do with that. There’s a moratorium coming up on August 31, and we’re trying like crazy with a lot of our couple of our big clients to try and get some building permissions in store and in line for when that moratorium hits. The cost of air-cooled equipment is now equal to, or even greater than cost, per ton versus water cooled. Also, they use four to five times the energy that a water system would use. What’s NV Energy doing as far as infrastructure for that dump on Nevada energy? It’s interesting to see what’s going to happen.
Ackeret: We may be fine in the long term, but the entire Colorado River basin has reorganizations that need to be done. The allocation of the water and all these things are in realignment. There’s a lot of things and, as engineers, we like to solve problems. But it’s not going to go away. I’d hate to see, [after] one good year, us taking a little bit off the pedal and slowing down instead of continuing on to fight the bigger issues of the water allocation and realizing we are in a desert environment. Do we really need as much grass growing out here? Do we need man-made lakes, all these things? Yes, we have perched water and we pump a lot of water out of the ground to maintain the Strip properties. That’s the water that’s there. Don’t touch it, don’t drink it. But it’s great to look at. We’re a wonderful city. We’re very creative in what we’ve built, and we’re going to continue to be creative here.
