Southern California Job Market : Surviving in the ‘90s : New Jobs Evolving to Help Clean Up the Planet : Up to $500 billion may be spent to correct ecological problems in coming decades. The effort will create both technical and blue-collar positions.
When Sharyn D. Nappi gets the call to hunt up a certified industrial hygienist, she knows it’s a tough assignment.
There are perhaps 4,500 such environmental specialists in the world--and all likely to be happily employed.
“And when someone says, ‘I need a CIH for Timbuktu,’ good luck,” Nappi laughs. Then she bluntly advises her client, “You’re going to have to pay them whatever you have to.”
Nappi is an environmental headhunter, vice president of Jeffrey B. Brant Co., an executive search firm with offices in El Toro and Woodland Hills. She stalks the restless environmental engineer, the newly certified solid-waste manager, the ambitious recycling specialist and other valuable personnel in the crusade to clean up the nation. And she can’t find candidates fast enough.
Particularly in the past few years, opportunities in environmental work have been tremendous, notes Nappi. And they only seem to grow, as the industry begins to look not only at cleaning up but at preventing future messes.
“The thrust for the future,” Nappi said, “will be going in and assessing a potential situation and taking precautions to prevent it from happening.”
Meanwhile, most of the current jobs are in businesses created literally by force of law.
Since passage of the 1970 federal Clean Air Act, 1972 Clean Water Act and the later Superfund laws, jobs have bloomed not so much in traditional conservation work--such as wildlife management--but in entirely new fields.
“I have never had a request for a park ranger,” said Rocco Catena, vice president and industry specialist with Purcell Group, a Los Angeles-based executive recruiter. “The greatest demand in the environmental field right now is for technically trained people.”
These are often the technical staff on cleanup teams, in regulation-driven industries that are likely to just keep growing over the next couple of decades.
For instance, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, under Superfund laws designed to remove or stabilize hazardous waste around the country, has already identified more than 1,200 sites and expects to add 900 to the list. Each cleanup is likely to average $25 million and take an average of eight to nine years. At the moment, 3,000 EPA employees alone are working on Superfund projects.
And this is just part of a vast environmental public works project that could cost as much as $500 billion over the next several decades, according to a 1989 report by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment.
More environmental work will come in such new fields as recycling. In California, for instance, 25% less trash will be allowed in landfills by 1995, 50% by the year 2000. And nationally, the EPA target is 25% less in the next two years. This is spawning a huge new field in waste handling and recycling, which offers not only work for the technically sophisticated, but also for the manual laborer.
“I see a whole range of needs,” said Robert H. Collins, president of Mine Reclamation Corp., which is at the stage of gathering permits for a recycling and landfill project at Eagle Mountain in Riverside County.
“People who operate heavy equipment or are in materials handling” will be needed, Collins said. “The recycling industry is going to be heavy on blue-collar workers initially because the way you separate (recyclable materials) is by hand. But there will be jobs in human relations, accounting--there’s a whole new industry being built up.”
Collins sees opportunity in recycling and waste management for refugees from the aerospace industry, in particular.
“We’re looking for bright young people who have experience in related fields,” Collins said, “because there is (a shortage of workers with) direct experience. . . . Normally, the aerospace industry has enough technical background, and that’s what you need--plus ingenuity.”
Indeed, people in other lines of work have already begun to specialize in environmental concerns. These include accountants, personnel managers, assessors, heavy equipment operators and, of course, attorneys.
“There simply aren’t enough environmental attorneys to go around,” noted the San Diego-based Environmental Business Journal.
“The hottest commodity in the legal job market is the environmental lawyer,” agreed Joel Moskowitz, a partner specializing in environmental law with Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher in Los Angeles. “The environmental lawyer has a lot to do, both in negotiating with government agencies and in bringing suits” to settle liabilities among various parties in contested cleanups.
Moskowitz recalls that demand for environmental specialists was already high even in the mid-1980s, when he was head of California’s Toxic Substances Control Program, an umbrella organization directing the state’s hazardous waste and toxic cleanup efforts. At the same time that Gov. George Deukmejian was cutting the state work force and had frozen hiring, he was increasing state jobs in toxic-waste cleanup by 50% a year, Moskowitz said.
Today, technical specialties once considered exotic are bread-and-butter careers in the environmental field.
For instance, the certified industrial hygienist that Nappi has trouble finding is typically responsible for the control of occupational health hazards ranging from exposure to chemical agents to physical nuisances such as noise, vibration and radiation.
Geologists, hydrologists, civil engineers and traditional soil scientists are now working alongside environmental biologists, nuclear engineers, health physicists, risk-management specialists, and sales and marketing people with environmental experience--with salaries in the area of $35,000 to $75,000 a year.
Experience is one of the best bargaining chips an environmental specialist can bring to the job search.
Boston-based CEIP Fund Inc. (formerly the Center for Environmental Intern Programs) offers one way to break in. CEIP considers itself the nation’s biggest on-the-job trainer for environmental work. In the past 18 years, it has placed more than 4,000 students and recent college graduates in short-term professional positions in environmental work.
Currently, this means positions with industry, consultants, environmental organizations or government agencies. The average job lasts five months, and median salaries are more than $375 a week.
CEIP Fund also has produced, through nonprofit Island Press (and on acid-free, recycled paper, naturally), a detailed, anecdotal “Complete Guide to Environmental Careers,” a book aimed at “the next generation of environmental professionals.”
That next generation will have not only the option of a career in a growing industry, but job satisfaction, said Kevin Doyle, national director of programs for CEIP.
“You can feel good about what you’re doing,” he said. “It’s challenging, and you run into other people who are really fascinating--by virtue of the fact that they have also chosen to devote their lives to environmental protection. And whether they choose to work for a major corporation or the Sierra Club, the same spirit moves them.”
