Community maintenance through community college: when an apartment association joins forces with a local community college to offer a facilities maintenance course, the result is a new crop of highly trained maintenance professionals.

Using an innovative approach of combining a community college's classroom setting with the curriculum and community college instructors of the NAA Education Institute (NAAEI), the Bryan/College Station Apartment Association (BCSAA) in College Station, Texas, is now efficiently and effectively offering maintenance technician training to a new crop of potential apartment staff hires.

BCSAA, in what has become a growing national trend for industries, particularly among apartment owners and management firms, is now better able to satisfy its members' needs of filling maintenance position openings by offering career training where it couldn't before.

MAINTENANCE 'TECH'

With 45,000 students at Texas A&M University of which most live in apartment communities, perhaps it is not surprising that approximately 80 percent of the help-wanted advertisements in the local Bryan/College Station, Texas, newspaper are for apartment maintenance and HVAC technicians.

"There are plenty of openings here," said Brian Burk, Director, Workforce Education at Blinn College in Bryan. There may be plenty of openings, but there are far too few applicants for the positions.

Recognizing that demand exceeding supply was an opportunity for local tradesmen and women, in 2006, Burk approached BCSAA Executive Director Rosemarie Selman, CAE, about offering a jointly sponsored course that would attract new workers to the apartment maintenance field. It is the first such program offered in the College Station area and one that is being adopted elsewhere. A management company in the Washington, D.C., market, has developed a similar program, working through local community colleges, and the Houston Apartment is working with its community colleges to train leasing professionals.

Just as Burk was witnessing the growing need for more trained maintenance personnel, Selman, too, had seen the signs. "Since 1999 we've had trouble finding skilled facilities maintenance personnel," she said.

One step she had taken to try to connect apartment community managers with trained facilities maintenance candidates was to set up an informal job bank. The association accepted resumes from technicians and then, when a member requested candidates' names, they would distribute the resumes they had on hand. "We quickly saw that there was more demand than supply," Selman said.

A NEW KIND OF PROGRAM

Three years ago, BCSAA offered a similar type of facilities maintenance course to the one Burk had proposed, Selman said. But the instruction in that particular course was limited to classroom learning because BCSAA had the instructors and the curriculum from NAAEI, but not the facilities. Blinn College, however, did have the space and was only two miles from BCSAA. Blinn's facilities offer ideal training conditions--a sort of maintenance laboratory.

Burk and Selman said they decided to collaborate on a new program to be held at Blinn College in early 2007, but run it using NAAEI curriculum and BCSAA instructors, with the goal of attracting new candidates into the field of apartment maintenance.

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Selman said she tapped into her many contacts with the apartment industry to promote the course to technicians interested in furthering their maintenance careers, and Burk used his network outside the industry to attract technicians interested in additional training. What they both offered was a 61-hour certificate course on facilities maintenance that could lead to a Certified Apartment Maintenance Technician (CAMT) designation, a nationally recognized certification provided by NAAEI. A routine and easily followed process is now in place for affiliates wishing to set up similar programs for other NAAEI designation courses.

As part of the course, participants learned to handle myriad repairs, from plumbing to electrical, gas and HVAC. Approximately 60 percent of the course consists of textbook study; the remaining 40 percent involves hands-on training and projects.

Their goal for the pilot class, which ran January 2007 through March 2007, was to enroll at least eight participants but no more than 12, which allows for plenty of individual instruction and interaction. Ultimately, eight students enrolled. Seven were from the apartment and hotel industries; one came from a retail background. The cost was $455 for the 61 hours of training, and those students who wanted to continue to earn their CAMT certifications paid an additional $200 for an extra 24 hours of training. Those extra 24 hours covered three classes of eight hours each that addressed customer service, fair housing guidelines and personal and property safety.

ADVANCEMENT OPPORTUNITIES

Audie Dunlap was one of the first to sign up for the course. "I've been in maintenance for five years and I wanted to put a little paper behind what I knew," he said. The fact that the facilities maintenance course would also help him earn his CAMT designation was also appealing. "Not a lot of people in the industry have this," said Dunlap, who said he saw the course as "a way for me to advance in my career."

Despite coming in with experience, Dunlap said he still learned a lot. "You'd be surprised at what you don't know--the right way to do things, the safer way. Even just the rules I learned have helped me," he said.

Troy Macks, Director of Facilities and Maintenance at Melrose Apartments and Student Suites in College Station, Texas, also saw the course as a way to move up the career ladder. What he didn't expect, however, was to find candidates for the two technician openings that he had at Melrose. But after working for several weeks with the other seven students, Macks said he saw how capable they were and he "knew how they thought," thanks to the systematic training they all received, which gave him added confidence in their skills.

Macks hired one fellow student who started the course after having just left a former job, and said he is hoping to hire a second graduate soon.

BROAD APPLICATIONS

Four of the eight students in the class held full-time jobs in apartment maintenance. The others were from the hotel and retail industries. One of those, Samuel C. Ginnis, now a Senior Building Services Specialist with national retailer Target Corp., heard about the course through his part-time work with a local apartment community and had registered for the course in the hopes of learning some new skills and improving the quality of his work, he said. But what he learned far exceeded his expectations. "The instructors, the course--it was fabulous," he said.

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And, surprisingly, much of the curriculum overlapped his responsibilities at Target. The only topic the course covered that he doesn't routinely deal with is washer and dryer repair, he said, but even that instruction helped him on the job. During the course, Ginnis discovered a problem at work with the HVAC system and called a service provider who quoted Target $5,000 to make the needed repair. Concerned by the high quoted cost, Ginnis himself took a look at the HVAC system and recognized the problem was a broken high-pressure switch, which could be replaced for a mere $500. In that one day, he saved Target $4,500 in repair fees, he said.

Although the curriculum is designed specifically for apartment maintenance, Ginnis proves that the training he received is directly applicable to other industries.

"The processes are the same in an apartment as they are at Target," he said. For example, he said, both organizations must comply with Occupation Safety and Health Administration guidelines, both tackle electrical problems routinely and both deal with other operational challenges. And although Ginnis generally does not have to repair appliances such as microwaves or dishwashers, the training he received helps him to determine when it is worth it to fix an appliance and when it makes more sense to replace it. That knowledge alone can help save any industry thousands of dollars.

FUTURE TRAINING

After a successful pilot class, BCSAA and Blinn College plan to hold a second class starting September 2007, and Burk foresees it as an ongoing program. "This is a dynamic area of the country with unbelievable growth," he said. "And where there are property rentals large apartment communities and rental properties--demand for craftsmen and tradesmen is extremely high right now."

Of course, that description fits many areas of the country. CAMT training may be just the ticket to filling ongoing maintenance technician openings.

WORKFORCE EDUCATION PROGRAMS

Workforce education programs are generally non-credit courses lasting anywhere from 1 hour to 250 hours, which are designed to help adults enter new careers or to earn promotions. Much of the focus is on skill-building or skill improvement. The majority of workforce education programs, such as the facilities maintenance course offered at Blinn College, are designed to provide continuing education credits or license renewal. However, community college workforce education departments are also equipped to custom-design courses to meet the needs of a particular company or industry. To investigate local workforce education programs, contact local community colleges. To find those colleges, visit this list of U.S. community colleges: http://www.utexas.edu/world/comcol/state.

Marcia Layton Turner is a freelance writer in Rochester, N.Y.