At the Higher Education Facilities Forum, three senior facilities leaders sat down for the kind of conversation that doesn't happen enough at conferences: less about technology and systems, more about people. John Shea, Chief Executive of Facilities and Infastructure at the US Merchant Marine Academy. John D'Angelo, VP of Facilities at Indiana University, overseeing 855 buildings and 39 million square feet across multiple states. Jim Jackson, who has spent close to 25 years at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln after never planning to stay that long.
The trades pipeline problem in higher ed is well documented. What doesn't get talked about as much is where the real pressure sits. It's not at the entry level, where there's usually a steady stream of people willing to learn. It's not at the senior end, where seasoned professionals provide institutional stability. It's the middle layer that keeps disappearing.
The 2008 recession carved out a whole generation of leaders who should now be moving into senior roles. Many of them left and never came back. COVID took another bite. And in markets where construction is booming, contractors can simply pay more. "We used to be able to keep people just with benefits," Jackson said. "Now every private company is offering the same benefits, probably better."
The answer, both D'Angelo and Jackson argued, is creating growth paths that are visible, specific, and real. IU built a pre-apprenticeship program that takes people who don't yet qualify for a helper position, pairs them with senior journeymen on a one-year contract, and runs them through a structured coursebook covering both technical and soft skills. Graduate the program and you qualify for the apprenticeship track. It costs relatively little and has the unexpected benefit of re-energizing experienced tradespeople who always wanted to pass something on.
"The journeymen become so attached to their candidates' success," D'Angelo said. "It's really like a familial relationship."
At Nebraska, they built career ladders for maintenance, grounds, custodial, utilities, and environmental health and safety, and negotiated with HR to post single positions that could be filled at multiple levels depending on the candidate's skills. Someone applying for an electrician role could be hired as an apprentice or a journeyman from the same posting. No more running ten separate job searches to fill one gap. And crucially, supervisors can approve raises within pre-approved ranges without going back through HR every time.
"By the time you interview somebody you want and get through the six-week HR process, they've already had five job offers and they're gone," Jackson said. Speed matters.
One of the sharper observations of the session came from D'Angelo, drawing on advice from mentors he'd had throughout his career. Most leaders, he argued, have been trained by HR to focus disproportionately on poor performers. The result is that top performers don't get enough attention, middle performers start to drift, and the poor performers stay exactly where they are because they're getting all the energy.
Flip it. Put your time into your top performers. Give them room, give them recognition, give them growth. The middle tier watches and follows. As for the poor performers: "They'll find ways to either improve or they'll self-select out," D'Angelo said. "You can't teach service mentality. You can teach technical skills. But that culture of wanting to be there? That has to come in the door with them."
The payoff, when it works, is that the team starts to recruit itself. People call wanting to join. And when your people do leave for other institutions or contractors, as D'Angelo has experienced with six direct reports now serving as VPs elsewhere, they become extensions of your culture rather than just departures from it. "I don't have any competition," he said. "If somebody recruits my people, they're paying the highest compliment to the team I've built."
An audience member put the question directly: what do you do when your best people can't get promoted because they don't have the paper credentials HR requires?
Neither panelist pretended it was easy. D'Angelo's previous institution required a college degree for any supervisory role. His solution was to stop fighting the policy and instead build a pathway: partnered with a local community college, found a way to use the existing employee education benefit to make attendance effectively free, and created a route for rising stars to get the credential they needed. "I could have put the same energy into fighting the institution," he said, "but I probably wouldn't have had the same outcome."
Jackson's take was more direct. HR departments at major institutions are often still making decisions based on precedents set decades ago. The precedents don't fit the workforce, the market, or the moment. "You have to say it out loud, and say it often: precedent does not matter," he said. "You need to treat every individual situation on its own terms. That's a new world. Start moving forward like it is."
The conversation spent real time on mentorship, not as a concept but as a practice that can actually be built into how an organization runs.
D'Angelo now holds a mandatory mentoring meeting with all his direct reports, not to offer himself as their mentor but to give them tools to become mentors themselves. The ask at the end of each conversation is always the same: pass it on. Find the next person and do this with them.
Jackson's version is quieter but equally deliberate. For him, mentorship is less about what you know and more about keeping people engaged, especially through the stretches in higher ed that are genuinely hard. Budget crises. Enrollment cliffs. Leadership instability above you. "The people that scraped me up off the ground and said 'you can do this,'" he said, "those are my mentors." Including, he noted, the people who work for him.
The point both made: people are watching everything you do, learning from the good and the bad. That doesn't need to be a source of anxiety. It's just the reality of leadership in facilities, and it's worth taking seriously.
Nebraska is currently carrying a structural deficit of $27.5 million and has just absorbed all athletics venue management on top of it. Kings Point is about to undertake a $3 billion campus modernization on buildings that were thrown up during World War II and never properly fixed. IU is opening a new campus in Washington DC while managing operations across multiple states.
The scale of the work is significant. But the throughline of the whole conversation was that none of it gets done without leaders who are developed deliberately, given real pathways, treated as people rather than headcount, and shown that the institution is invested in them. "We can teach you how to fix things," Jackson said. "It's really tough to teach somebody to be humble and to be a good person. That's what I hope I see around us."
Watch the full discussion below...