All across Saskatchewan, rural municipalities are bracing for an onslaught of retirements that will change the face of administration in rural Saskatchewan.
A recent questionnaire by the Rural Municipal Administrators Association estimates that 46 administrators will retire in less than three years; 60 more will retire in three to five; and an additional 50 will retire either in or very soon after 2015. Thus within six years, an estimated 53 percent of administrators in rural Saskatchewan, 156 people, will leave their profession.
In Alberta, the situation is similar though a tad less severe. A 2007 survey for Alberta Municipal Affairs and Housing found that 43 percent of chief administrative officers plan to leave their jobs within six years. In fact, the single most important major issue identified by CAOs in rural Alberta was not infrastructure (20 percent) or growth management (25 percent) but lack of qualified staff (47 percent).
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The Manitoba Municipal Administrator’s Association has 250 members and 59 percent of its members are eligible to retire within five years. Clearly, a pressing problem is developing. The challenge is how to respond.
There are two people in Saskatchewan helping to co-ordinate efforts to fill the dozens of administrator positions that will soon become vacant. Christine Crowe is head of credit studies at the University of Regina, which offers the province’s only Local Government Administration (LGA) program, and Mr. Kevin Ritchie is the executive director of the RMAA.
Both conclude the problem facing recruiters is not so much disinterest in the profession of RM administration but rather the curious absence of awareness – curious because Saskatchewan remains one of the most agrarian provinces in confederation and the one most connected to its rural roots. In many ways, RM administration is as close to those roots as one can get.
Ritchie observes that recruiting new administrators has been an ongoing struggle and that is particularly true where young people are concerned. He describes common reactions from young people he meets at career fairs: “They knew of the guy in their hometown who did it but they had no idea what he did or that it could be a career.”
Crowe offers something similar. She says young students “have absolutely no idea that this career exists, that they can walk into a job” after graduating from university. She refers to the profession as “one of the best kept secrets in Saskatchewan.”
Best kept secret might be an understatement. Louis Genest is the administrator for the RM of Britannia and he took part in a high school career fair at which a student asked of his profession, “is this social work?”
Statistics affirm that there is a healthy interest in the local government course generally, if not the administrator position specifically.
Crowe notes that registration in the LGA program has been running at full capacity each year since 2005 and the majority of the students are women. Twenty years ago, most RM administrators were likely male, but in an apparent reversal of roles, recent statistics show just one man enrolled in the course for every eight women.
In fact, since 2005, 89 percent of the LGA graduates have been women.
Many people entering the course come from the 40-plus age group. In 2007, for example, just 25 women between 18 and 24 years of age enrolled compared to 81women over the age of 40.
Likewise in 2006, 15 women between 18 and 24 enrolled compared to 84 over 40. So Genest, male and 24, is bucking the gender trend and he is certainly aware of it. He recalls attending his LGA course with just one other young man.
It seems that in many instances, administration is a perfect fit for women. Crowe explains that many women have husbands who farm and so working as an administrator is a natural choice. It is one of the few professions available in small towns or sparsely populated regions in which women can find rewarding work that allows them to remain in and contribute to the community.
The secretary of the RMAA’s board of examiners, Jim Angus, once quipped tongue-in-cheek that “there are two constants in the life of an administrator: dogs and garbage.”
The attractions of the profession, however, are many. The element of the job that appeals to Genest, for example, is the diversity. It is a job in which he can do “700 different things in a week” and all are challenging, intriguing or interesting in some way.
At university job fairs, Crowe says students and recent grads have indicated that they would like to return to their hometowns or the regions where they grew up and she notes that administration offers them that opportunity.
We might identify this impulse to remain in or return to one’s hometown or region as nostalgia. The word derives from the Greek “nostos,” which means return home and “algos,” which means pain. Thus we have “return home pain.”
Perhaps it is this feeling, this impulse, that will go the greatest distance in ensuring the looming shortage of administrators won’t be a serious problem at all.
