By Matt Fishbune
Roughly a third of the water workforce is eligible to retire within the decade. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects about 10,000 operator openings a year through 2034. Brookings found that 88 percent of treatment plant operators are 45 or older, compared with 45 percent of the national workforce. Fewer than five percent are under 25.
We are starting to move funding dollars (State Revolving Funds and WIFIA grants) at higher levels toward the most decayed infrastructure in modern American history, and we are about to hand it to the smallest and least experienced workforce this sector has had in generations. Every one of those annual budgets and capital plans assumes execution capacity. Almost none of them price it.
The Problem Is Bigger than Utility Vacancy Data Shows
Here’s the part most workforce projections miss. When a utility can’t fill a role, the work doesn’t disappear. It gets contracted out.
I’m on the receiving end of that, and I’ll be straight with you: we are recruiting from the same shrinking pool. We work hard at recruiting and developing people. We hire for coachability not just trade experience or resume. We have begun to build a pipeline through veteran and athlete programs that people often overlook. It helps but it is still nowhere near enough.
And we are still short. Anyone in this industry claiming to have solved recruiting is selling something.
So a portion of the sector’s shortfall has already migrated onto contractor payrolls where it is harder to see and rarely counted. Utility vacancy data understates the real constraint, which means the risk inside the annual budget or capital program is bigger than the reported numbers suggest.
What’s Actually Scarce Is Judgment & Experience
The instinct is to treat this as a headcount problem. It isn’t, quite. A 30 year operator knows which basin floods after a hard rain, which line runs a grade the drawings got wrong, and which neighborhood calls in first when something is off. None of that lives in a manual. It lives in someone’s head, and when they retire, it’s gone.
Meanwhile, industry surveys from Black & Veatch reveal that while 70% of utilities collect operational data, only 19% can effectively leverage it—with 71% of struggling utilities citing staffing and skills shortages as the main roadblock. We are automating systems faster than we are training the operators who run them.
Technology Helps, and It Has a Ceiling
Technology tells you where the problem is. Skilled people fix it. I say some version of that constantly, because every few weeks there’s a tool that identifies a defect faster, models a risk more precisely, or flags an anomaly nobody would have caught manually. All of it is real and all of it is good. But finding and fixing a problem are two different jobs. Software can tell you exactly where a pipe is failing, but only after a crew and equipment are sent 40 ft underground into a century-old sewer, is it fixed.
The work is hard to simplify. These are aging assets with incomplete historical records. Field conditions change block to block. A sensor reading that looks routine in one soil type indicates real risk in another. You do not solve that with a single data point.
Technology has made our people dramatically better at their jobs. Electronic maps, acoustic inspection, CCTV, sensors, and flow monitoring give us visibility we didn’t have a decade ago. They tell us where to look first. They don’t tell us what to do once we’re there.
A few years ago, we ran a comprehensive assessment for Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, a city facing inflow and infiltration that threatened both capacity and compliance. Using acoustic inspection, sensors, and flow monitoring, our teams assessed 238,214 feet of sewer pipe and inspected 1,168 manholes. That data let the city build a rehabilitation strategy based on actual conditions rather than guesswork.
You have to understand the system before you invest in it. Spending capital on a system you haven’t characterized is how a utility ends up rehabilitating the wrong 20 percent.
But the technology did not make the decisions. Experienced people had to interpret what the data showed, separate routine wear from genuine risk, decide what got prioritized, and then do the physical work. A flagged anomaly on a screen isn’t a diagnosis. It’s a starting point for someone who knows what they’re looking at.
Everyone Is Competing for the Same People
If it’s any consolation, we’re not alone. In March 2026, Randstad analyzed 50 million job postings and found demand for robotics technicians up 107 percent, HVAC engineers up 67 percent, and skilled trades overall up 27 percent over four years. Time-to-hire for trades roles now exceeds professional roles. For every 100 young people entering manufacturing, 102 leave.
Randstad’s CEO described trades scarcity as the real constraint on global growth, pointing at the people building data centers and upgrading power grids.
That’s the competitive context for water utility recruiting. We are bidding for the same welders and electricians as the AI buildout, and they can pay more.
What We Can Do Now
EPA recently committed more than $10 million to water workforce development, following a roundtable on lowering barriers to entry and coordinating operator certification across state lines. The interstate certification piece is genuinely useful and cheap. A certified operator moving from Ohio to Indiana shouldn’t start over.
But $10 million against a third of the workforce retiring is a signal, not a solution. Four things would do more.
Get high school students inside treatment plants – not in front of another brochure. These jobs pay above average. More than half the water workforce holds a high school diploma or less, and the work cannot be offshored or shut down. They are stable, essential jobs with real career paths. We have to get young people close enough to see that.
Capture institutional knowledge now, while the people holding it are still on the payroll. Do not wait for a retirement notice. Every year you wait, more of it leaves permanently.
Recognize the work. We built a culture that honors firefighters and police but forgets the people keeping water safe and sewage moving, our “unsung (or unrecognized) heroes.” That is a cheap fix, and municipalities control it.
Redesign the work itself. Continuous monitoring allows a smaller crew to cover more assets and respond to conditions instead of driving a route. It does not replace skilled people, and I won’t pretend otherwise. It buys time.
The Risk Line Item Nobody Has
There is still an assumption that technology will leave the skilled trades behind. The opposite is happening. As infrastructure gets more instrumented, the value of people who combine technical fluency with field judgment goes up. Technology multiplies capability. People deliver results. Every dollar we invest in infrastructure assumes somebody will be there to operate, maintain, and repair it. That workforce risk deserves its own line in every capital plan. Right now, it rarely has one.
Matt Fishbune is the chief executive officer and a board member of Duke’s, a national field services company focused on protecting and rehabilitating critical underground infrastructure for municipalities and utilities. Since taking the helm, Fishbune has tripled the business in revenue, EBITDA, and headcount, growing Duke’s to $100M+ in annual revenue, 400 employees and 2,500 customers across the country.
The point that the real shortage is bigger than utility vacancy numbers show rings true from where we sit. We run a job board for traveling trades workers, and when a utility contracts the work out, the contractor ends up chasing the same operators, pipefitters and electricians the data center jobs are chasing. The Randstad finding that trades now take longer to hire than professional roles matches what we see in postings. Your workforce-risk line in the capital plan is the idea I’d push hardest, and the first step is knowing who is actually available to staff a project in a given metro before the bid goes out, not after.