The Workforce Won’t Wait—How Associations Can Keep Up

Instability seems to be an inherent part of the American workforce now: In the past decade, the average job tenure has dropped from 4.6 to 3.9 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That job-hopping can present an acute challenge to associations that are not only looking to support newcomers in a profession where there are shortages, but also to keep them on the job longer.

Associations have successfully deployed various strategies to do both, from outreach to high schools, trade schools, and community colleges to providing tools that allow practitioners to develop their own career paths, with guidance around specific training and credentials that path would require. At the Irrigation Association, a trade group supporting irrigation professionals, CEO Natasha Rankin, CAE, looks at workforce skills training on two paths — supporting the education and training of employees of member companies, and advocacy efforts that help ensure that those employees play an ongoing role in publicly funded projects.

For instance, the Irrigation Association (IA) has worked to ensure that its certified members qualify as an approved Technical Service Provider for projects administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. “By getting that certification, you are now both leapfrogging a significant amount of administration and significant amount of time,” Rankin says. “The only way that we can create that connection is by our policy efforts — we have to go out and engage with the agency.”

Nurturing Talent at Every Stage

To draw more workers to the profession, IA does many of the conventional workforce-development initiatives: scholarships, mentoring, and school outreach. But to support its mid-career employees, it has retooled its volunteer programming to help it deliver meaningful engagement to members. “Our industry is highly technical, and that means that there are a lot of product managers, developers — not the head of a business unit, but on the ground, the connector between what’s going on in the field and what’s going on in R&D,” she says. “Those are the people who have incredible experience and expertise to help us advance our standard setting and code development.”

Providing that kind of practical support, Rankin says, helps employees maintain their knowledge and sustain their position at an employer. “We’re not just sending out a note saying, ‘Thank you so much for your volunteer work,’ but we’re saying, ‘This has value to you,’” she says. “You can share this back with your company and say, ‘This is how it helped us get in the news, or this is something that helped our business.’”

Bolstering Leaders

While association leaders have been working to support the career prospects of their industry’s workforce, they also need to be doing work on themselves. Carol Vernon, founder of Communication Matters, an executive coaching firm that works with associations, says that many mid-career leaders find soft skills a greater challenge.

One particular change that leaders may not have fully adapted to, Vernon notes, is the hybrid office. As more employees work remotely, and more employees express general disengagement with their work, leaders need to do more to bolster the kind of range of communication skills the new environment demands. “Leaders looking to future-proof their careers need to continue to fine-tune their emotional intelligence, because the relationships that we manage are not as obvious anymore,” she says. “We don’t sit together in meeting rooms as much as we once did, and we don’t have the same opportunities to meet in person.”

That doesn’t mean abandoning the kind of hard-skills knowledge leaders require around digital literacy, cybersecurity, AI, and more, she says. Understanding emotional intelligence not only helps support the association’s employees but it also creates a space for the kinds of innovation they’ll be required to make.

Vernon recommends that leaders pursue that work alongside their staff, not separately. “Early on in my association career, it was very much about going to an all-day training, and then six months later, going to another all-day training. Today, it is much more of a collaborative approach. Leaders need to do more to work with rising leadership to help them say, ‘I have a responsibility here. I own a part of this. This is what I need.’”

How great of a challenge is “unclear career pathways or limited growth potential” relative to the workforce?