By Leslie Stimson, Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief
Several representatives of the National Association of Tower Erectors (NATE) came to Washington, D.C. recently to lobby Congress, the FCC and various government agencies. Inside Towers Washington Bureau Chief Leslie Stimson sat down with the six members of their lobbying team to discuss NATE’s regulatory priorities and get a sense of their 30 meetings. Sitting at the table were: NATE Board Director John Paul Jones, Board Chairman Jim Tracy, COO Paula Nurnberg, Board Director Randy Scott, Executive Director Todd Schlekeway and Director of Legislative and Regulatory Affairs Jim Goldwater. In part One of our series, the topic was the tower worker shortage. Today, we cover workforce development.
Workforce Development
IT: You need workers to maintain what’s out there now and you need workers to do new stuff.
Schlekeway: We had a great meeting earlier with Warriors4Wireless-Major General Kevin Kennedy. We’re collaborating closer with them. JP Jones helped them develop their training curriculum. Our subject matter experts are helping that organization. We’re looking to build a pipeline of the workers and promote our industry — the work opportunities through the military venues. Today, we’re meeting with several minority advocacy groups that are focused on jobs. The Hispanic-Latino community, the African-American community and we’re telling that story that there’s great opportunity here. We’re basically uncovering every stone we can. These guys who have their own companies live it. But if there’s one thing I hear daily is we have a labor shortage.
Tracy: Paula is working with some folks to do our first multi-lingual, bilingual training. NATE is ahead of the curve, adding tools for companies to actually do enhanced training that is bilingual. We featured the “Women of NATE” in a summer issue. All hands need to pull together.
IT: So you’re doing all this different outreach because you need workers for all the upcoming projects.
Tracy: We’re doing it because younger workers don’t understand what a great career there is in wireless. And we’re exposing them to that. One of the funny things that is starting to resonate with people, wireless is the only career where you start at the top and work your way down!
IT: How long does safety training take?
Tracy: It depends on what you’re training for. If you’re training to get a rank and file line worker, that’s going to start a career in wireless, most people would say that there’s going to be about a two-week training process. That’s one of many different pathways you can take. Employer training, community college training, paid training, vocational training, military training—a lot of those things contribute. But it’s going to be a couple of weeks just so you’re an authorized climber. It’s going to put you in, by and large, what our industry would consider an apprenticeship. And apprenticeships don’t take place so much in the classic form. They can take place in a lot of forms. Most of it’s going to be company-provided training. To do something in the tall tower work — you’re not going to want to put somebody on a tall tower who hasn’t been doing it a couple of years. I wouldn’t want to.
IT: What’s considered a tall tower?
Jones: 1,000 feet and up.
Tracy: And some people, such as the past NATE chairman would say over 500 feet. Because anything over 500, you lose the ability to communicate without supplemental means.
In part Three tomorrow, we’ll cover the administration’s infrastructure package.
November 16, 2017
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