To celebrate Veterans Day this upcoming Friday, November 11th, the Energy Central Community Team will be shining a light on the many outstanding utility professionals in our network who also spent time in the military. This week, we'll be featuring interviews with these veterans sharing how they found their way into the industry. We will also highlight their unique perspectives of the industry and how they are influencing the utility space.
All the interviews will be collected at this special Veterans Day 2022 topic tag.
To all the veterans in the Energy Central Community, we want to say thank you for your service and we wish you a Happy Veterans Day.
Rodney Lance thought he would work with state-of-the-art military aircraft when he enlisted at an Air Force career fair in 1986. Instead, he was assigned to the mechanical career field as an environmental support specialist. “I was hesitant and nervous because I did not know anything about the career field which involved utilities - water and wastewater,” says Lance, who was 18 at that time. More than 35 years later, his misgivings have vanished. “It [the assignment] turned out to be a blessing in disguise,” says the now 55-year-old.
While it did not involve the excitement of flying airplanes, Lance’s work in the environmental support unit was important. As he explains it, every Air Force base needs clean potable water and a wastewater treatment unit.
The job taught him character-building traits and exposed him to different cultures and thought processes by enabling him to work in different countries. He was in the Middle East during the Gulf War and has worked in the jungles of South America.
After more than 24 years in the military, Lance retired in 2011 and joined Veolia, becoming plant manager for the City of the Great Falls municipal utilities, where Veolia has been operating and maintaining the city’s wastewater treatment plant for many years. He has risen rapidly through the ranks and currently works as a project manager at that same plant.
His Air Force experience has proved valuable at his current job and helped him win awards for his performance. For example, he was the 2020 Operator of the Year and received the 2018 William D. Hatfield Award for Industry Excellence.
Working in Challenging Circumstances
Lance’s daily duties in the Air Force ranged from ensuring the availability of clean water to setting up filtration and chlorination systems to plumbing. Attention to detail is necessary to succeed in the utility industry and the military, says Lance. “You have to be a hundred percent correct 100% of the time,” he says.
He began his Air Force career at a wastewater treatment in Las Vegas, an area prone to drought conditions. That motif of working in adverse circumstances often recurred during his career in the military.
According to Lance, the military mindset is defined by adaptation because of the nature of the job. The luxuries of an Air Force base might very well transform into the harshness of a desert or a jungle the next day.
Lance’s job of building mobile showers and latrines for the troops became substantially more difficult during deployments in unfamiliar terrain. He relates the experience of walking for several miles in Colombia and Oman to search for water supply. No matter what the water looked like, it was his job to transport it back to the base and treat it to make it usable for the troops. “You have to quickly make the calls and sometimes you are the only one on base [who can do the job],” he says.
His working life at Great Falls is relatively more stable, however. He works with defined processes and a team, instead of a rotating cast of military and local professionals. “There is a lot of more support [in civilian operations],” he says.
But the levels of hierarchy and stakeholders are different. While the military had clearly defined top-down levels of command and control, Lance’s current job has many stakeholders – including colleagues, managers, and reports – that he must keep happy. There are also external clients – municipality officials – to whom he is accountable.
Using skills he developed as a project manager in the military, Lance uses many spreadsheets to track key metrics related to operations and keep all stakeholders updated.
Making Water Utilities Desirable
“When people think of a career in wastewater management, there’s not a very good thought behind it,” says Lance, referring to his chosen profession’s reputation. But, as in the Air Force, wastewater treatment is a necessity for cities.
Fewer youth choose the industry, opting for more glamorous options like tech or management. A wave of retirements in the next five years is expected to further exacerbate the situation.
Lost in this gloomy outlook for the industry are its benefits. According to the Brookings Institution, water jobs pay more on average as compared to other jobs. Even the workers in the industry’s bottom rung are paid 50 percent more as compared to workers in other industry. The push towards green energy will also make the industry a critical lever because it involves efficient recycling.
Lance prefers to see a half-full glass. He says the retirements translate to more opportunities for those interested in making a career in the industry. His unit recently organized a tour of their treatment plant for the public. “People were amazed,” he says.
According to him, water utilities need to highlight more of their work in publications, school districts, and the military to advertise it as a career option. “We need to make it more desirable,” he says.
A Career in Wastewater Treatment
To succeed in water utilities, candidates need to have good math and chemistry skills, says Lance. Besides this, being detail-oriented – dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s – is a necessary attribute.
Soft skills from a military career translate well to the utility industry, says Lance. One of the most overlooked is the ability of military veterans to work with a diverse group of people, according to him.
In his deployments abroad, Lance worked on understanding different mindsets of his colleagues from different ethnicities and nationalities. “You learn the value of patience and understand their work ethic, which may be different from yours,” he says.
That experience is helpful when diversity has become a mantra for success across careers. At Lance's current job with Veolia North America - the utility is making it a top priority to recruit a wider range of employees with diverse backgrounds, including women. "They [the new recruits] have brought new ideas that others hadn't thought of before," he says.
Change in gender and racial makeups are only one among the many changes, including technical and process ones, occurring in the industry. Lance says adaptability, which he first learned in the military, has helped him thrive. “I know a lot of people don’t like changes, and I am one of those, but you have to adapt or you’ll be left behind,” he says.