Alaska process industry career consortium: developing the framework to replace an aging workforce.

• Author: Bradner, Mike
• Position: WORKFORCE TRAINING

Despite the petroleum industry's current challenges, much of Alaska's natural resource-based economy is doing fairly well, it appears. The state's six producing mines appear to be profitable and most are expanding, adding resources and new production. Seafood appears to be doing well, with another record-breaking salmon harvest likely in 2015.

Even oil and gas employment remains strong, at least for now, although the current activity is mostly with projects committed to before crude oil prices plunged in late 2014. Industries that support baste resource industries, like construction and transportation, are also holding their own, if employment statistics are any indication.

This ebb and flow is, however, a common challenge that faces all of these industries. Despite commodity swings, oilfields and mines will continue to produce. There will be needs for service, support, and maintenance.

Since what goes down comes up, eventually, the prudent operator must be prepared for the upswing. The challenge all of Alaska's traditional "blue-collar" industries now face is that their workforces are aging; skilled workers are retiring and must be replaced.

This is a real problem during a down cycle. Young people may not perceive a future in such fields, and education and training takes years. Low prices may impair training budgets and funding for university workforce programs. Right now, with the state budget hit hard by declining oil revenues, the university and the resource industry community is worried about preserving the training infrastructure that has been established.

Training is increasingly needed, too, and industry can't do it all.

"Seventy eight percent of middle-wage jobs require some kind of certification," says Cari-Ann Ketterling, acting director of Alaska Process Industries Career Consortium (APICC). "We want to work with the training providers, including the university, to ensure that the skills that are currently needed are what is being taught."

APICC is a consortium of industries formed to help coordinate training in the process technologies.

Identifying Critical Skills

Mining, one of the state's oldest industries, offers a prime example of an industry that could be soon expanding, but yet is already struggling with an aging production workforce and recruitment issues. Mining is not one of the state's major employers, unlike seafood or tourism, but the jobs pay well--$100,000 per year on average, second only to petroleum--and most mining jobs are steady and year-round, not seasonal, since the state's large producing mines operate twelve months of the year.

Wages in mining have been growing much faster than wages for the state as a whole, up 22 percent between 2002 and 2011 compared with an 8 percent average wage growth for all Alaska private sector workers.

About 4,600 Alaskans were employed 'in mining in Alaska in 2013. That number has been...