Engineer design firms gearing up for a construction boom in Connecticut are facing hiring and recruiting challenges that will only increase as the demand for services in the petroleum, energy and transportation sectors continue to grow, industry observers say.
A number of Connecticut engineering, architectural and general contracting firms have secured lucrative multimillion-dollar contracts in the state and greater New England region, spurring a competitive hiring push.
Kansas City-based Burns & McDonnell, which opened a Wallingford office in 2006 and recently landed several high-profile contracts, has 325 employees in the state and plans to hire at least 50 more people this year.
Middletown environmental engineering firm Wright-Pierce hired 30 new people last year, and has added eight new staffers so far in 2014.
Brett Williams, who heads up Burns & McDonnell’s New England headquarters in Wallingford, said he wants to recruit workers from Connecticut, but a major challenge is finding local engineers that have the specialized skills his firm needs.
“It’s incredibly difficult to find qualified talent,” said Williams, the firm’s senior vice president. “Right now the hardest people to recruit are engineers who have 10-to-15 years of experience. When the recession hit a few years back and we slowed down, we received something like 40,000 resumes across the company that people submitted to us voluntarily.”
Williams said the firm’s recent additions are part of a companywide plan to hire 600 people this year. The employee-owned firm added 700 jobs in 2013, ending the year with 4,300 workers.
Today experienced engineers are being wooed with sky-high salaries and attractive incentive packages as the economy rebounds and companies battle for scarce talent. Hiring managers are looking to other sectors and even expanding their geographic search internationally to find the right workers, experts say.
“We always try to hire local engineers first,” said Williams. “Once we exhaust all our efforts to do that, we’ll look nationwide and even beyond to the international market to find the right people.”
Despite the tight labor market, business is booming for Burns & McDonnell. The firm posted $2.3 billion in sales across all its business units last year, up 15 percent from $2 billion in 2012; it expects sales to jump another 15 percent this year.
The flourishing energy sector is driving huge growth in the industry, said Williams. He said the demand for companies to modernize current facilities, find new ways to refine and use petroleum products and increase production levels is fueling the need for engineering professionals.
The firm is close to completing its work on the Maine Power Reliability Program, the $1.4 billion project started in 2008 to modernize a 40-year-old power grid across 75 communities in the Northeast.
This year, Burns & McDonnell started on the New England East-West Solutions (NEEWS) project, a three-state $200 million deal that will be completed in 2016. And the firm has at least two years of backlogged work it must tackle, with more coming down the pipeline.
Recruiters say it takes twice as long to hire engineers compared to other professions, and salaries are up as high as $125,000 to $200,000 for skilled workers.
It’s a simple case of supply and demand, said Tony Moretti, vice president and area manager for Parsons Brinckerhoff, a New York-based consulting firm that provides a wide range of program, engineering, planning and construction management services.
Parsons’ Glastonbury office opened in 1984 and in the past four years has grown its workforce by 50 percent, bringing its current total to nearly 70 employees.
Current and recent projects include the I-95 New Haven Harbor Crossing Corridor Improvement Program and the New Haven-Hartford-Springfield High Speed Rail Program for the state Department of Transportation.
Parsons Brinckerhoff battles for many of the same workers that other engineering firms, oil companies, transporters and real estate developers contend for, said Moretti.
“I’ve been here for 30 years, and this is the best recovery I’ve seen,” said Moretti, who heads up the Glastonbury office. “We’ve doubled our revenue since 2010, expanded the company in Connecticut and hired more people.”
Like Burns & McDonnell, Moretti said Parsons Brinckerhoff relies heavily on a variety of strategies to help it recruit qualified engineers, from scouring college fairs for promising students to cultivating relationships with the professionals it already employs.
Each year, both firms — and many others in Connecticut — invite a handful of engineering interns to gain valuable experience in the field.
It’s a win-win, said Moretti, who taps that pool of prospects for new hires and “emerging talent” to help build up a strong, long-term workforce.
