Dear GTC IFMA members,

I’ll start with a quote by Douglas Adams, “I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”

I recently re-read an article by Anne Cosgrove in Facility Executive magazine that posited, “the age of the ‘accidental facility manager’ is winding down.”  I think that may be true.  Many years ago, I stumbled into a Facility Management job via an interior design degree.  I didn’t even know what a Facility Manager did; let alone how to perform the job effectively.  It was a lot of on-the-job training, and I mainly learned from my mistakes!

The IFMA Foundation wants to make the path to be a professional Facility Manager more streamlined.  They want to provide specific educational and training programs through existing college and university systems that will provide the student with a degree in an accredited Facility Management program.  Their efforts, through the Global Workforce Initiative (GWI), uses this tagline, “Making Facility Management a Career of Choice by expanding educational opportunities”.

In 2018, the GWI was able to work with the US Bureau of Labor Statistics to create a separate Standard Occupational Code to officially recognize Facility Management as its own career (and not lumped in with Administrative or Construction Management).  Our number is up: it’s 561200, and the official name of our profession is NAICS Facilities Support Services.  This is a huge accomplishment, as it will allow the collection of very specific metrics to list current salaries, job opportunities, and educational requirements.

GTC has reactivated their GWI support committee and is working through the IFMA-created checklist that we hope will allow North Carolina to create an accredited Facility Management degree program.  Recently, we partnered with the Charlotte NC Chapter to reach out to potential Facility Managers at a high school level by connecting them to Skills USA competitions.

The IFMA Foundation states that more than one half of today’s practitioners are expected to retire in the next 5-15 years.  Does that include you?  Join us to see how you can promote the profession through work on the GWI Committee.  Connie Drake is heading this up for GTC.  Please contact Connie if you are interested in joining us.

Cris Karasek
President 2018-2019