Remarks by
BG William E. Rapp
Northwestern Division Engineer
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
National Society of Professional Engineers
Portland, Oregon
27 July 2008
Good morning. I’d like to thank President Bernard Berson and President-elect Bradley Aldrich, along with members of the NSPE Board and House of Delegates for the opportunity to join you today.
I hope you’re finding time to discover Portland’s unique personality and just why it consistently is voted one of the “best cities to live in.” I count myself pretty fortunate to have landed here for the next couple of years.
You have already heard from members of the Portland District of the Corps of Engineers and many have gone out to Bonneville to see the operation there. I am very proud of that team.
Let me just take a few minutes to share with you some of the major goals and priorities of our Chief of Engineers, LTG Robert Van Antwerp and what Northwestern Division is doing to deliver on our missions and increase our collective level of technical expertise.
The Chief has outlined four metrics that will help us know if the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is on the road from a good organization to a great one.
We ask ourselves four questions:
1) Are we delivering superior performance in all mission areas?
2) Are we setting the standards for our profession?
3) Are we having a unique, positive impact on our Nation and other nations? and
4) Are we building the bench – creating a Corps built to last?
And we have to accomplish these in the context of:
* The largest workload ever;
* An aging infrastructure;
* A graying workforce with thousands of boomers eligible to retire in the coming years;
* A shortage of college graduates with degrees in science, technology, engineering and math; and,
Let me start with the delivering of superior performance in our missions.
Our military construction workload is the largest since World War II. In fiscal years 2008 through 2013, the Corps will manage an Army military construction program of an estimated $39 billion.
It’s peaking right now (2008 and 2009) at about $10 billion per year to meet the intense demand brought about by the growth in the Army, global restationing, and base realignment and closure. This year alone, Northwestern Division’s share of this work is $1.7 billion.
In the civil works arena, the President’s Budget for fiscal year 2009, transmitted to Congress this past February, included $4.74 billion in new federal funding and an additional $5.76 billion in an emergency request, for a total request of $10.5 billion. For Northwestern Division this means an annual civil works budget of $800 million with an additional $360 million in environmental work.
The budget funds the planning, design, and construction of projects for the 3 main water resources mission areas of the Corps -- navigation, flood and coastal storm damage reduction, and aquatic ecosystem restoration -- and gives priority to those projects that will provide the highest returns on the nation’s investment.
Executing all of these military and civil missions, which total over $3.0 billion for the Northwestern Division, on schedule and with great quality is allowing us to make a positive impact on the nation.
The other two metrics that tell us is we are moving from good to great as an organization deal with technical competence, leadership in the engineering field, and proactive hiring of the young talent needed to keep the Corps strong into the future.
More than ever, we need the right people… disciplined, dedicated and diverse…. on the Corps' bus and, importantly, in the right seats on the bus.
And we need our workforce to be leaders in their various fields, certified as Professional Engineers, Project Management Professionals, warranted contractors, and others licensed to professionally practice their craft.
We are taking a number of steps to get there.
We recently held a National Technical Competency Workshop at our headquarters in DC. Here representatives from academia, private industry, contract partners, customers, and professional societies joined members of the Corps team to identify and tackle the major challenges ahead. Some of you may have been part of this workshop that has helped to set a roadmap for the future.
For the current workforce, we want to ensure that they are challenged and growing the skills they have by giving them the right amount of technical work to do. That means keeping a good portion of challenging work in house, rather than contracting it out, to ensure we maintain needed expertise.
We also want to help our team achieve technical certification in their respective career fields. As I mentioned before, licensure is a key milestone for our professionals and important for promotion.
In today’s Corps, professional registration is required for any position having independent responsibility for making engineering or architectural decisions (or review) that could substantially impact public health and safety.
More than 58 percent of the engineers and architects within this division of the Corps hold professional registration. Nationwide, about 50% of Corps engineering professionals are licensed.
As you know however, learning the profession does not stop with licensing. Our goal is for each professional to maintain a commitment to life-long learning. The Corps offers long-term training such as opportunities to pursue advanced degrees, reimbursement of relevant graduate coursework, and payment of professional registration costs. In addition, we’re looking at a beefed-up Training with Industry program, as well as virtual training programs and opportunities to bring trainers into USACE.
And we’re exploring a more structured mentoring plan to make sure our employees are getting the guidance, support and training they need throughout their career lifecycle.
As a result of a recent “gap” analysis, we are beginning to target our recruiting more heavily to the specific competencies we will need in the future, such as geotechnical engineering and GIS.
Looking to the future, we want to become the employer of choice for new graduates, even for established professionals who are looking for that mid-term career change. The Corps, with its large and varied workload, is a great place for engineers!
The payoff in recruiting and maintaining such a highly trained and technically competent workforce is not only superior performance, but in making contributions of lasting impact and value to the nation.
Take for example, several of the new technologies that have found a firm foothold in the way we do business today.
Building Information Modeling – 3-dimensional building design modeling – has been used in our military design and construction for the past couple of years.
BIM helped catapult the Jackson Avenue barracks at Fort Lewis to win the top design award for the Corps this year. We are working earnestly to integrate this into our civil works area as well.
Another innovative technology is the use of enterprise geospatial data systems. Using this kind of layered database, we can see all of our infrastructure and projects and pull up detailed information about them quickly and in relation to other structures.
I was at Grand Coulee Dam for its 75th birthday this past Friday and was reminded once again about the impact that engineers have had on this country. That spirit of innovation and determination to overcome all challenges is alive and well today.
Thank you for all that you do in promoting and elevating the engineering profession. I am proud to be a member of this profession and proud to be part of the Corps of Engineers.