18469_Authority_June

municipalauthorities.org | 13 S uccession P lanning – M aking R etirement P lans for Y our N ew H ire We have heard quite a few terms lately about the water workforce: brain drain, silver tsunami, gray wave, senior apocalypse, the skills gap, and Millennial takeover. They all speak to a changing of the guard in the water workforce. We’ve talked about it since the early 2010s, we saw it coming, and now it is here. If you haven’t been working on knowledge transfer and succession planning, your world is likely to get challenging real soon. What we know for sure is that our workforce is, and has been, ageing out. Coming into the 2020s we saw the average age of water operators in PA steadily rise to 55+ years of age. But it is not all doom and gloom. Some of the first indications that our workforce is getting younger are emerging. At a recent State Operator Certification Board meeting in April of 2025, PA DEP shared with us that the tide is indeed turning. The average age of certified operators in PA has now fallen to 50.6 years of age, down from 51.4 years of age just two years ago. And with that, one of our next challenges is emerging. We often talk about the need for systems to become more resilient. We go off and storm proof, contingency plan, emergency plan, and do the best we can to anticipate the challenges that inevitably will pop up at our facilities. But at conferences, and in the literature, I rarely see or hear us talk about planning for a resilient workforce. We often treat issues such as outreach, messaging, recruiting, retention, knowledge transfer, and succession planning as discrete efforts. We deal with one, then a few years later we must deal with another. Most of us rarely approach these efforts as an interrelated system of strategies and plans. Having the fortune of working with the next generation of water workers daily, I can tell you that there are good workers headed your way and that the future is bright. As a Gen Xer, I can say for sure that Minnellials and Generation Z are an acquired taste, but do not buy into the idea that they don’t want to work. That could be further from the truth. If you have started hiring younger workers such as our graduates from the WET program, thank you. You’re about half-way through the human asset management journey. Now it’s time to go to work. On the day that you make that job offer, it’s time to start thinking and planning for that new hire to retire in about 35-years. Make no mistake, the most disruptive force in our industry is the day we lose treasured and dedicated employees. Whether planned, sudden, or tragically, we will lose them. Nothing contributes more to high quality water, clean effluent, high value biosolids, beneficial biogas, and all the great products we produce and deliver than the workers both inside our plant fence and those working in our community water infrastructure. When we talk about system resiliency, we refer to its ability to continue to carry out its mission in the face of adversity. It is the ability of a system when exposed to hazards to resist, absorb, accommodate, adapt to, transform and recover from the effects of these in a timely and efficient manner. By extension, succession planning is a strategic approach to identifying and developing future leaders within an organization. It ensures continuity of critical roles and minimizes disruption when key employees move on to new opportunities, retire, or pass away. Resilient systems have succession planning. And succession planning is the last in a series of systems and initiatives that lead us from outreach to that new hire to that retirement party and back to outreach again. If you are a manager, sit on an authority board, or make recommendations/decisions about hiring, retention, and promotion of water workers, you likely already know that the turnover rate of your water workers is increasing. This By Heath Edelman, Thaddeus Stevens College of Technology