#6 – Education and Facilities Management with Carissa Kelly

6-Education-and-Facilities-Management-with-Carissa-Kelly

Introduction:

Welcome to another episode of the modern facilities management podcast brought to you by Stratum. I'm your host, Griffin Hamilton. This is the show where I interview industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights into modern day facilities management, from hospitality, to commercial real estate, and everything in between. We'll learn what it really takes to succeed as a facilities manager. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Good morning, thank you for tuning in to another episode of the modern facilities management Podcast. Today I've got with me Carissa Kelly with Harvard Medical School. Carissa, how you doing? 

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

I'm great. How are you?

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I'm doing well. Getting ready for the weekend.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Definitely. Always excited when it's Friday.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, hey, thank you so much for taking the time to connect this morning. Really excited to talk with you about your career and getting into facilities management and with that, tell us a little bit about who you are, both personally and professionally.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Sure. I was born and raised in Massachusetts, out in Western Mass, not really the boonies, but kind of the boonies, I went to Mass Maritime for my undergrad, which is down on the cape and then I moved out to the Boston area, probably around six months after graduation for a job and I've been here ever since. I started my career with Sodexo, which is a service provider in the facility management industry. They were fairly young in the industry at the time and I worked in hospital settings for them and after that I've moved on to medical device manufacturers, I’ve worked in the financial sector, in office buildings for health insurance companies, higher education, kind of the full spectrum of facilities that you can manage.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And with that broad of experience, what has been a unique piece that you’ve taken away from each different industry.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Unique! I think that every building has its own quirks. So just because you're really good at managing and I didn't mention, I've also worked in hotels, but just because you're good at managing hotels doesn't mean that you're going to be an expert on an office building when you first start. So it's kind of you have to learn the nuances of the facility that you're managing to be successful.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I've also seen, on the opposite end of the spectrum, that there is a lot of overlap between the two so that's an interesting point that you bring up of how each different type of facility can present its own unique problems. As far as the overlap goes, what do you consistently see facility to facility that you've managed?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Every facility is going to have air handlers, they're going to have, like, I want to, say, boilers, but not every building is going to have a boiler in it. But they're all going to, they're all going to have vav boxes, they're all going to have plumbing and electricity, and that type of stuff and depending on the industry, you're going to have other types of things, you're going to have different parameters of where you want to keep your buildings as far as temperatures and humidities and all that type of stuff goes. One facility I worked at had a cogeneration plant in it, and you don't see those everywhere so that's kind of where they can be the same and where there can be big differences.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Tell me a little bit about your background, really what piqued your interest on getting into the field, because you had a pretty intentional route getting into facilities management.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

So I chose Mass Maritime because I liked the school and when I was a student there, there was only four majors available. I think they've bumped it up to six or seven, maybe even eight at this point. But at the time, you could only choose either marine engineering, facilities engineering, marine transportation or marine safety and environmental protection and I knew I wanted to do one of the engineering majors, I just wasn't 100% sure on which one that I wanted to go on. I spent two terms out at sea, trying to determine which one I wanted to do like if I wanted to live my life on the ocean or if I wanted to stay on dry land. We had some breakdowns on the ship and that was not a party and also the engine rooms and ships can get really hot, especially if it's a steam power plant on them, like 125 degrees on a good day. I decided that I wanted to be shoreside so I went the facility engineering route.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So if 125 is a good day, what's a bad day?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Bad day can get upwards of probably like 150 160 degrees down there.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So you're working in a Sauna? Yes. I do not blame you for wanting to stay on dry land there.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

And I mean, not a lot of modern ships have steam plants in them so it's a lot better working conditions. But the older ships on like the merchant routes and everything. Some of them still are. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That's interesting and I imagine the limited resources being out on the water makes that role quite challenging to say the least.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Yeah, I would think so. I'm not in that industry so I can’t speak to what their experiences are but it really wasn't something at the time that I was interested in pursuing as a career path.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah and like I said, I do not blame you there. So from there, once you realize you didn't want to work in a Sauna, what next steps did you take to further your career?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Sure. As I said, I worked for Sodexo in hospitals and I graduated from my undergrad in 2005. When the economy crashed in 2008, I was actually laid off for my position and I spent a couple of years in limbo, working in retail and bartending, doing all those fun customer service jobs which looking back on now, was beneficial, because there is a lot of customer service in like the facility management field so I got to sharpen those skills a bit. But I try to think probably 2010 or 2011, I got a job as a technician in a hotel. So I worked overnights and is answering customer complaints about their rooms, they didn't have hot water, or the pressure in their shower wasn't good or it was too hot or too cold or the cable was out, doing basic carpentry work in areas that couldn't be done during the day. From there, I moved on to being a technician in an office building and that building was close to being 100 years old. It came with some really unique challenges simply based on the age of the building and from there, I moved on to being a facility coordinator, which is just kind of managing work orders, managing the staff and hurting their timesheets, those types of things. During that position, I decided that I was going to go back and get masters in facility management so I went back to Mass Maritime for that and they do a really interesting executive program set up so you go every other weekend, four hours on Friday night, and then eight hours during the day on Saturday and that's all of your class time. You only take one class at a time and work your way up to your capstone presentation at the end of 18 months I think the program lasted and during that I switched jobs a couple more times. I became an assistant facility manager for a financial institution, I was working for a different service contractor at the time Jones Lang LaSalle and from there, I moved on to pursuing an MBA because you need a lot of business kind of skills in the facility management industry as well. So I started an MBA and moved on to a different account with JLL. It was in the pharmaceutical sector at that point and shortly after I finished my MBA, I got recruited to higher education and I have been there ever since.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

So you bring up a lot of your background that to me, it covers every piece of facilities management. You alluded to your time and hospitality and the customer service skill set that you really finetune there. You obviously went and got your masters in facilities management and then even further, got your master's in business and all of those pieces on top of your, obviously you're pretty handy having been in that technician role as wells So you cover the whole spectrum of what facilities management entails. I guess to someone looking from the outside and think of Facilities Management as the individual that is more hands on and the importance of having an MBA or that business acumen isn't really forefront. Can you speak to that and how having your MBA has made an impact on your career?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Sure. So I think kind of the old version of the facility manager was the person who was very technical and could go out and pick up a wrench and fix an issue themselves. I think that points to the fact that nobody really knew of facility management as being a career choice and a path that you could very deliberately go into and oftentimes, it was just the head technician, like, oh you know these buildings and everything really well so like, now you manage the facility and nobody really, I think thought, then that you would have to deal a lot with people and being uncomfortable in their offices, because it was too dry, or because it's too hot or too cold and you have a thermostat in one office that controls three, and all three people are looking for different settings in their offices and kind of trying to manage that to keep them all happy. I don't think that really came into a lot of people's minds when people were realizing that you actually needed someone to manage that facility and so now that it's becoming a more robust facility in my current position, I don't go out and fix things myself. I mean, I manage the budget for our department and I write contracts for vendors. I write white papers for systems that I think we should bring online in our facility and I deal a lot with the end user. I'm the liaison between the technicians and the customer, for lack of a better term, even though we all work for the same company. That's kind of how we look at it is the occupants of the buildings that we manage are our customers and so like, really, you want to be able to communicate with them and when you're doing a budget presentation, you need to know how to talk to the finance people in order to get the money that you need to run a successful facilities operation. It's a whole slew of skills that you need to have that are becoming more prevalent as the industry gets more sophisticated. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I guess switching gears to your masters in facilities management because that to me just seems so broad, right. What in that program were your main takeaways. What are you consistently applying to your day to day role there? Because sounds like on the business side of it, that's a majority of what you're doing on a day to day basis but I'm interested from the facilities perspective.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

So the thing that I didn't realize when I was in that program, and until I started my MBA program was that some of the classes actually overlap. I've taken Organizational Behavior twice. I had finance classes in both of them. It's changing that mindset of okay,  I need a new air handler, and like being able to speak in a way that conveys to people who aren't experts in that about why you need to spend hundreds of 1000s of dollars on this piece of equipment. I think that would be like my biggest takeaway, that's the thing I remember the most from the facility management program was kind of how to talk to people that don't know what you know.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And what's interesting, just about the industry in general, from an educational standpoint, there's not too many programs out there specific to facilities management. What steps do you think someone could take that might not be the traditional educational route like you took to get into the industry get their feet wet, and really have that total experience and that type of education between the customer service overall facilities and then the business aspect of it as well.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

I'm kind of an outlier in my industry. I'm one of four in my position where I work right now and I'm the only one that has any type of educational background in facility management. One person studied project management, and another person has a degree in IT and you know what I mean. There are a lot of paths into the industry and I think that maybe the unfortunate thing is some people just kind of fall into it, either through working in security or working in IT but I think probably the closest and a lot of schools offer project management and so pursuing the project management field, maybe project management isn't the right term, more focused on construction management. That is a very similar path so if people are struggling to find schools in their area that offer anything to do with facility management, and I think it's almost exclusive to the Northeast that you're going to find schools that actually do offer it, Construction Management is a good first step, I think.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

And as far as certifications go, first off do you have any certifications? Or did you just strictly focus on the higher education route getting your masters,

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

So I do. I’m a LEED Green Associate and I have a CFM. I plan to take the LEED AP exam at some point this year. I've toyed with the idea of getting a sustainability, like Efma offers a sustainability certificate, so I've looked into that one, I'm not 100% on whether I want to get it yet or not because it is relatively new. But the certifications are definitely helpful. You'll see a lot of job postings out there now that are looking for people to have the CFM exam, or staff that take the CFM exam and have the certificate before they'll even consider you for employment. So my current employer, it was required that you get it. You didn't have to have it when you started, but they did want you to get it.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Interesting and switching gears to the future of the industry, do you foresee these programs that focus in facilities being more common here throughout just more than the Northeast?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

I hope they are. So I'm a member of Efma in the Boston chapter and I'm a member of the career advancement committee there. Efma does a lot of work with colleges in kind of bringing programs like this online or recommending programs like that, and so you can actually go on Efma website and find schools that do offer it or offer other programs that are backed by Efma as kind of a lead in into the industry. I have contacts at other higher education institutions that are looking into bringing programs like that online and I think it's just now becoming known as something that you can deliberately choose to do with your career and so I think once more people see that, you'll see programs coming up more and more.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I'm very excited to see where the industry goes and the opportunities that are there, just instead of the traditional, I fell into it, because I'm a good technician, I kept working my way up the chain of command and like you being very intentional on getting into the industry. Sticking with the future of Facilities Management, currently close to 90% of facilities managers out there are white male, a big goal of what stratum is doing is to really pave the way for the new wave of facilities managers, and with that is having more diversity there. After that, what do you see as the future of Facilities Management from a diversity standpoint?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

I'm glad you brought that up. As a black woman in a white male dominated field I have had my own individual struggles with kind of getting my career moving and getting to a place where I really wanted to be and over the years, I've seen the amount of women in the industry pick up I think that there's still a lot more work to do there but the minority population is still incredibly low. I haven't worked with a lot of people who look like me. I think it's important to focus on the youth, there's a lot of kids who go to technical schools for high school, and they don't know that this exists as a career path. In my opinion, along with, like nursing, and doctors, and like vets, it's one of those industries that you can go into, that there's always going to be a need for people, you know what I mean? Like the world is always going to need facility managers, and there's a lot of job security, and that. I think the fact that like, you can choose this as a career and you can pursue it and you can be successful and have a career for the rest of your life. In front of people at the right age, and that's in high school, while they're deciding where they want to go to college and what they want to do with the rest of their lives. I think that's going to be a big help.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah and I think with just in any industry, in any role, the more diversity, the better, if you have the same profile, across the industry, you're not going to have these groundbreaking new ideas coming out, because everyone shares a similar mentality, right? Having different backgrounds having different perspectives really move the industry forward and I think that's a great point of just how important that is as we continue to improve as an industry.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Absolutely. For me, it was difficult coming up through the ranks like not seeing anybody who looked like me and like, that's another big piece of it. I think, if you look at an industry and you don't see anybody who looks like you, you're not really going to be interested in pursuing that. Before, I mentioned how I got laid off when the economy crashed back in 2008 2009 and I had seriously considered switching industries, going back to school and learning something else, because I didn't know how I could be successful in an industry that was so dominated by males, and so dominated by white males. I had experiences where people were like, well, why should I trust what you have to say and it's just like, I know that question wouldn't have been asked of somebody who looked like the person who was asking the question. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Mmhmm. Yeah. And that's obviously a shame to have to go through. I can imagine during that time, the difficult decision that you're having to make of transitioning, going through a bad economy, trying to find the next door for your career, obviously, very thrilled that you've stuck it out. On that, what really made you stick to it and continue to grind and find that next opportunity?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

I guess just a passion for the industry and maybe kind of my own stubbornness of like proving to myself and everybody else that like, I could do it.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Having that internal drive of, I'm going to prove you guys wrong, I can do this. I know what I'm doing and just because I don't look like you doesn't mean I'm wrong. Right. I love hearing that and to go down that a little bit further what do you think the industry needs to do to really drive more minorities and really increase the diversity in the industry? What needs to occur there?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Oh, that's a tough one. Not something I've really thought about. It's like, yeah, this would be great, but I don't know how to do it. I think making it more accessible. I think that a big part is making it more accessible. Not everybody can afford to go to college and I'm lucky that I live in Massachusetts and a state school offered a degree to get you started in this career path. That I think like the other school here that offers it is Wordworth and I couldn't afford Wordworth now and I have a really good job. So I think accessibility of kind of getting started is a big factor in that. 

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah and I think what's interesting about facilities management, we touched on it earlier, as far as a majority of people do fall into it and so I think on that point of getting into it, you don't necessarily go to college initially, you can go to trade school, a lot of people do go down that route, and you could still be very intentional on here's my end goal, getting into facilities management, let's get certification after certification, work my way up. To me, it's one of the very rare career paths that you don't need to have a college degree and it's something that is becoming more common with universities but it's not required. I think, really shouting that from the rooftops of saying, Hey, this is a really great career path that you can just get your hands dirty, and work your way up and not have $100,000 in student loans. Where that's, again, not very common.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Also, I think finding companies that, will support you in getting those certifications. Like I said, my current employer wants you to have CFM, and they pay for you to get that certification and so I think if more companies are looking for those types of things, like they should be willing to support their employees in pursuing those goals.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

I'll let you use this platform to sell the importance there. Why should an employer really invest in their facilities manager to continue their education?

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

The industry is constantly changing, new technologies are always coming out, new skills are always needed and I believe that staying stagnant and not continuing to improve yourself is no way to live your life for one. But also, if you want to stay abreast and help move your company forward, then the continuous improvement needs to be there.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

Yeah, absolutely. Frankly, you can't afford to not invest in your employees and if something in the facilities goes wrong, everybody in the company feels the impact. Not to say that everyone's job isn't as important but if someone in accounting and finance makes a mistake, their group might be hurting a little bit but if someone in facilities makes a mistake, then the entire building literally fills it. One last question that I like to ask everybody who or what has made the biggest impact on you and your career. I’m putting you on the spot here.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

You are putting me on the spot. Sure. I've had a couple of bosses and mentors over the year who have really helped me kind of grow into the person that I am in my career today. There's three in particular; two with JLL and the first manager from where I work now, she has since moved on to other institutions. But it was one male and two females and just kind of really letting me talk through things, pushing me to  be the best facility manager that I can be kind of giving me the whys of when I think something that I've been asked to do is ridiculous and going to bat for me. Like those people have stood by me and gone to bat for me with superiors on some occasions and without them I wouldn't be where I am today.

Speaker: Griffin Hamilton  

That's great and everyone I talked to, someone has made a big impact. That goes into just finding a mentor, having someone that can really guide you and groom you as you move through the career so that is something that I love hearing there. But Carissa, I certainly appreciate the time here this morning. It's been an absolute pleasure learning about your career and getting your insights onto facilities management. Again, thank you so much and have a great rest of your Friday.

Speaker: Carissa Kelly  

Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Outro:

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