A wealth of experience

Building Operating Management, Nov 1998 by Kozlowski, David

Degrees are important for today's FMs. But there's no replacing the work done in the trenches.

It wasn't that long ago when the facility manager was a professional who cut his teeth on changing the lamps or working the loading dock of the very same school he later would manage.

And on the way up, he got to know everybody who was anybody on the campus, and they got to know him. What he may have lacked in exposure to new ideas, he made up in a knowledge based on years of experience - an experience ground in real hands-on work

There are still facility managers who can claim that background, but many more facility managers are moving from school to school toting a strong formal training. Some even began their professions at facilities other than educational ones. But when it comes down to it, a number of facility managers say, there is nothing like hands-on experience.

As one who started out as a student in the 1960s at the University of Utah and ended up making his career working there, Pieter van der Have, director of plant operations and president of the Association of Higher Education Facilities Officers, understands the value of "growing up" with the facility.

"There's a lot to be said for working your way up and knowing the institution inside and out," he says. "You gain a more thorough experience. You work with the students, faculty and administration very closely, so that you can even learn to anticipate needs.

"I think a formal degree can help in this profession, but I don't think it is critical to the profession," he says. "A facility professional should have common sense and a good aptitude for technical subjects, and he or she should be a good business leader. We run facilities more like businesses - more like being a contractor to students and faculty."

Jim Christenson, director of plant operations at the University of Michigan, places more emphasis on technical, formal training than van der Have. He would expect facility managers today to have a degree in engineering or architecture and a degree, maybe a master's degree, in business administration. But absolutely critical is the experience.

"I know how important hands-on can be, because I started in a small college, where it is always more handson," Christenson says. "You got involved in a lot more projects personally. There was a lot more personal contact with faculty and students, even with the facility staff Here, I see regularly maybe 10 people on staff. There I saw almost everyone on staff."

Education's role

Formal degrees do provide a number of things for the facility professional. Christenson says an engineering degree or an architectural degree is important because it provides the person with a good grounding in the type of technical subjects that a facility professional will face.

A self professed up-and-coming facility manager says, she agrees.

"You need to know how to read blueprints for one thing," says Amy Malinov, facility manager at Luzerne County Community College. "Formal training sometimes provides shortcuts to knowledge that you might have picked up on the job - it just would have taken you a lot longer."

Malinov has learned to respect experience. Coming from the private sector and working for a number of national construction management firms, Malinov earned her stripes working in the trenches with a group of, in her words, "typical construction-worker types." As a woman, learning in that environment was a great experience for her, she says.

"When I started there weren't a lot of women in construction," she says. "So it made me work twice as hard - sometimes I only got half as far. But it taught me the importance of earning the respect of others. And you don't earn their respect anywhere else but in the trenches."

Although she has an architecture degree, she says the key facility issues she learned, she has learned on the job.

Every architecture graduate should have to do a stint at a facility, she says. "Then she would learn how to deal with problems with the humidity in a building and temperature control, where some people say they are hot, and others are cold. On paper - what the architect sees - it may work, but in reality, it sometimes doesn't."

Van King, assistant superintendent of facility services at the University of California at Davis and an architect, says knowing how buildings really work, not how they are supposed to work, is what fuels his interest in facility management.

"I feel really engaged when I am on the operational side of facilities," King says. "I like to see how a building responds to the weather and how it responds to use. These are things you don't necessarily learn as you're pursuing a degree.

"How else do you know what works and what doesn't," King adds. "There is sometimes a distance between a good idea and its utility in the field. As a result, facility managers are sometimes working with imperfect or insufficient information. As you gain operational experience, you learn how to adjust to the lack of information and rely on your experience."