The FM Pipeline Team, creators of the Facilithon Facility Management competition in SkillsUSA, have agreed to collaborate on an official basis with ASHE, the American Society for Health Care Engineering. This collaborative alignment offers critical health care facilities an advance opportunity to land young adult talent, as early as in high school. FM Pipeline’s chairman Jim Zirbel stated, “ASHE understands the criticality of this ever-widening skills gap. Our collaboration is indicative of good leadership within the ASHE space, knowing that without a direct relationship with graduating high school students, their next step is a fog bank for employers.”
ASHE staff are focusing on rolling out the Facilithon program’s opportunity to their respective regions around the United States and helping to develop the Wellhead(c) program, the gateway for students and employers to have direct relationships through FM Pipeline’s secure web portal. Zirbel noted “The Wellhead is a critical faucet of talent at the end of the FM pipeline, engaging, enlightening and energizing our next gen of FM. Each year we’ve solved for key roadblocks to populating the increasingly large Facility Management need. Without a direct relationship at high school graduation, employers are betting on ancient systems to deliver talent in a world that has dramatically changed in the last 5 years, leaving those models marginally usable. That transition is a fog bank from which without a relationship, the talent is more likely than not to disappear, never to return. Given we already know the student, its imperative that relationship remains through any training, whether post-secondary, apprenticeship or other.”
Leaders from FM Pipeline Team will be attending the Health Care Innovation Conference in Anaheim this July, to update regional and state chapter leaders on the Facilithon’s landscape and processes, continuing to strengthen the organizations’ collaboration.
FM Pipeline Team is a non profit corporation dedicated to engaging, enlightening and energizing our #NextGenOfFM, with a vision of a sustained pipeline of facility management talent. Communications can be sent to director@fmpipeline.org.