I am amazed at the lack of good help available at this time. We cannot find any qualified people willing to draft or party chief. With the push for 4 year degrees, my suspicion is the intellectuals of our profession have diminished the apprenticeship role of the past, and this has killed the Community College programs. Our local program used to have 20- 30 students, now 5-10. The tech program is the answer and should be supported as the future of our profession demands it. As a society we used give our support to the community college , not anymore and it will be our undoing. 4 year school is not producing enough students and not producing technicians , they all think thier managers . Someone has got to do the tech work . But its in vogue to support 4 year degree requirement. Did you see the lack of numbers that took the test. We are being co-opted by other disciplines and we are to blind to see it. So in 20 years it will not matter.
Rant off.
I was in land surveying for long enough to somehow survive 2 out of 3 downturns. The first, I was able to move to find work. The second, we were put to part time for a while until things recovered. The last time (2008), the recovery was not fast enough. I now have a job which is hopefully not as susceptible to downturns in the economy.
Add to the above that I am too old to be out in 100 degree heat doing much much of anything. I do not have the desire to get a surveying license either, nor try to run a business. Nor do I care to fill in for field people who have the need to call in "sick" when it's 15 degrees or anything above 90.
djames, post: 327633, member: 189 wrote: I am amazed at the lack of good help available at this time. We cannot find any qualified people willing to draft or party chief.
The country is still coming off several years of severe downturn. Years of no entry level employment sort of dries up the pool of mid level people like PCs, etc.
djames, post: 327633, member: 189 wrote: I am amazed at the lack of good help available at this time. We cannot find any qualified people willing to draft or party chief. With the push for 4 year degrees, my suspicion is the intellectuals of our profession have diminished the apprenticeship role of the past, and this has killed the Community College programs. Our local program used to have 20- 30 students, now 5-10. The tech program is the answer and should be supported as the future of our profession demands it. As a society we used give our support to the community college , not anymore and it will be our undoing. 4 year school is not producing enough students and not producing technicians , they all think thier managers . Someone has got to do the tech work . But its in vogue to support 4 year degree requirement. Did you see the lack of numbers that took the test. We are being co-opted by other disciplines and we are to blind to see it. So in 20 years it will not matter.
Rant off.
I have said this before on this forum, but I have hard time recommending being a surveying technician (unless your climbing the ladder toward being a professional) as a good career choice. The combination of low pay, little-to-no benefits and lack of job security really make it a hard sell.
Norman Oklahoma, post: 327639, member: 9981 wrote: The country is still coming off several years of severe downturn. Years of no entry level employment sort of dries up the pool of mid level people like PCs, etc.
quite true. many move to other career paths or McJobs.
Bow Tie Surveyor, post: 327643, member: 6939 wrote: I have said this before on this forum, but I have hard time recommending being a surveying technician (unless your climbing the ladder toward being a professional) as a good career choice. The combination of low pay, little-to-no benefits and lack of job security really make it a hard sell.
actually I think it very much depends on location. out here in the West it seems that Office Techs and PCs make great wages, often More that a staff LS (staff LSs often get "salary" = many many hours, and no OT.)
Apprenticeship is also being hurt by the reality of one man shows made possible by robotic TS, AutoCAD and GNSS. The Eng. firm where I work has had a one man survey department for at least 10 years. They have turned over 4 PLS's and two survey tech's in that time:bored:.
I helped train/mentor 2 PLS's , an LSI, and a survey party chief at my last place of employment (16yrs)
I have three guys now (may be adding an rpls in the coming days): one well paid tech, one well paid pc, and a 20-year old kid I hired a year ago from behind a bar for $10/hr (he's up to 15 now). Other than the kid (who, if he wants to, has a long, bright future ahead in surveying), I got lucky with the other two- both guys i've worked with in the past and both who happened to be looking for a different job when I needed a guy. Otherwise I interviewed about 2 dozen people in the last year and have been generally disappointed in the combination of experience level/willingness to generalize/salary demands. I count myself extremely fortunate to have landed who I have now, and don't mind one bit paying them what I'm pretty sure is the upper end of wages for their respective positions in this area.
When I was a young party chief the number of helpers was plenty and when one left there were several waiting in line. They were aged 18 to 70 and each would contribute something
During the summer the company I was working for would hire high school football players that the coach wanted to be in shape when the season started.
For the last decade or so, finding any helper that is serious about their job has been very rare.
It has been a battle of minds with most helpers after they have been with me long enough to learn some of the ropes. At some point they just believe that I am asking them to do too much and more than necessary.
They find a saddle to fit in and believe that their current duties are all it takes without realizing there is much more being done they have not been introduced to. Too many find it overwhelming when they want to take that next step and it is too far for their liking.
The common phrase that has come from them is that they don't want to read manuals and learn on their own and that I should constantly overshadow their work and teach them everything step by step.
All in good time grasshopper. I will teach my helper whatever I am able too, given that I can do my own job and we can complete jobs in a timely fashion. The people that want to upgrade from Rodman to Iman in their first week are in for a rude awakening.
wrote: "The common phrase that has come from them is that they don't want to read manuals and learn on their own and that I should constantly overshadow their work and teach them everything step by step.
^^^^ yep.
just let a guy go who was also a very experienced and very well remunerated PC. but i asked and expected a level of adaptation to modern technology that i guess he just wasn't willing to undergo. gave him all the manuals, all the websites, all the phone numbers, all the resources, and about a month of personally walking him through every last detail of how i expected it to be done. after about 3 months of getting phone calls or text messages from him on every little technical question i'd had enough- was murdering my ability to get anything done myself, and showed a glaring lack of initiative that, to me, didn't bode well for the future.
addendum to my previous post: in '08 i was one of 5 staff rpls at my former firm. at the time we had 8 techs and 14 field crews. 6 months later i was the lone rpls left, and had 2 techs and 3 crews at my disposal- and we all spent more time during the week figuring out how to bill our work than actually doing billable work. i don't know what happened to most of those people (i now employ two of them, one took my place when i quit, and another is no longer with us), but i know a good number of them took that as their opportunity to bid adieu to the field of surveying. all i know now is i'm nervous about the next one, but it's also great motivation to make as much hay as i can now- things are incredibly good, and i'll take it for as long as i can.
(Hope you don't mind me fixing your thread title.)
ETSU is about half-way across the state in TN and from what I knew back then had a great surveying program at one time. I worked with many students out of there when I was still in the western NC mountains.
I have long since lost touch with all of them so I have no idea how they turned out.
They were all young. All under or well under 30 years old.
One firm I was at had a feller who said he had 8 years with CALTRANS running the gun and was bucking for PC in our company. I don't know if he was just full of it, or just incompetent (I don't mean that in a bad way - just not meant for surveying). I was told he had dropped a gun off of a small cliff before I had came on board. He reminds me of Lt./Capt. Sobel from the "Band of Brothers" HBO mini-series. Zero sense of direction or distances. Can't read a map. I mean Gees.. really??!!
I've told that story so many times when me and him got sent on recon.
I just graduated from a 2 year program at Renton Tech. College in Wa. We ran in to the same thing. We had so few student that they cut the program enrollment to every other year. It is very unfortunate since it seems that so many companies are busy, but like you said, cant find good help.
LSAW is very involved in our school which we were so fortunate about. We were all hired months, if not a year, before finally graduated.
Good employees are just as hard to find as good employers. It has to be a good fit for company and employee.
Until the survey profession at large learns to charge for the value of our service (not just the hours worked) the earning potential will never attract talent.
If entry level employees get laid off every couple of years and have to go on a rice and beans diet they will change their career path.
Carry on.
What actually endeared me to surveying was the mystique of digging something up that hadn't seen the light of day in 100 years and the romance of trying to read old quill penned notes and descriptions. Add all that to the love of the outdoors and I was hooked.
But I think the public's opinion of our profession has probably changed since I first started. Most of my more recent inexperienced hires seem more interested in being employed indoors with a large monitor and high-speed internet provided. Although I am a believer in requiring a degree for licensure, that in itself may diminish the number of young folks that view the profession as a long term option. I have also seen an increase of folks that seem to think "working outdoors" is menial and sub-optimum. Posiblemente todos debemos aprender espa̱ol...
There could indeed be trouble on the horizon for our profession. But I'm too optimistic to become too fearful. I'm betting that we will be replaced by a generation of people that may very well eventually out shine us. And if there are fewer of them around in the future, they can adjust their rates accordingly!
paden cash, post: 327770, member: 20 wrote: And if there are fewer of them around in the future, they can adjust their rates accordingly!
As long as we all understand basic economics, it should pan out.
