Classroom activity Grade 11 Careers & CTE
Staffing Tesnia Regional Water Authority: A Hiring Simulation
A grade 11 careers simulation where student teams match candidate cards to open water-sector roles and rank hiring priorities around the sector's retirement wave.
Objectives
- Students will match candidate qualifications to the requirements of five different water-sector roles.
- Students will explain how the sector's retirement wave shapes which roles are hardest to fill.
Vocabulary
Key words: operator license, instrumentation, retirement wave, qualification
Teacher overview
This is a small-group decision simulation for teams of three or four students. Each team acts as the staffing committee of the fictional Tesnia Regional Water Authority, which has five open roles and five candidates. The activity teaches the concept directly: students must match real qualifications, such as an operator license class or controls experience, to the actual requirements of each role, and then reason about which roles are hardest to fill when a large share of the workforce is nearing retirement.
Activity Directions
- Setup (5 min): Group students into staffing committees of three or four. Give each committee one set of five candidate cards, the open-role list, and one recording sheet. Explain that every candidate can be placed in only one role, and each role takes one person.
- Round 1, matching (10 min): Committees read the five candidate cards and the requirements for the five open roles, then place each candidate in the role that best fits their qualifications. They record their matches and a one-line reason for each on the recording sheet.
- Round 2, hardest to fill (10 min): Committees discuss which open role was hardest to fill well with the candidates they had, and why. They connect this to the fact that about 10,000 openings for water and wastewater operators are projected each year from 2025 to 2035, all from replacing workers who retire or leave the occupation, and that in 2016 only about 10 percent of water workers were 24 or younger, compared with 12.5 percent of all U.S. workers.
- Priority ranking (8 min): Each committee decides which single role they would fill first if they could hire only one person this month, and writes the incentive or reasoning behind that choice.
- Share and debrief (7 min): Two or three committees report their hardest-to-fill role and their top priority. Close with the debrief questions on the recording sheet, drawing out how the retirement wave changes hiring across the whole authority, not just one role.
Student Handout
Open roles at Tesnia Regional Water Authority: wastewater operator (Class III license needed), distribution operator (Class II license needed), water quality lab analyst, instrumentation and controls technician, and maintenance mechanic.
Candidate cards:
- Candidate A: recent high school graduate, strong hands-on mechanical skills, no operator license yet.
- Candidate B: two-year associate degree in water technology, has passed the Class I operator exam.
- Candidate C: associate degree in chemistry with a laboratory internship.
- Candidate D: licensed electrician with programmable-controls experience, no water license.
- Candidate E: operator with twenty years of experience and a Class IV license, retiring soon from another utility, willing to work part-time as a mentor.
Recording sheet, debrief questions:
- Which open role was hardest to fill well with your five candidates, and why?
- About 10,000 openings for water and wastewater operators are projected each year, all from replacing workers who retire or change careers. How did the retirement wave show up in your committee's decisions?
- Candidate E is near retirement but holds a Class IV license. What is one cost and one benefit of hiring E part-time as a mentor?
- If you could fill only one role this month, which would you choose first, and what reasoning or incentive drove that choice?
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
- Answer: Accept any supported choice. A common answer is the instrumentation and controls technician or the Class III wastewater operator, because only one candidate (D or E) has closely matching experience, leaving little backup if that person declines.
- Answer: Accept responses noting that Candidate E is already near retirement, so hiring E does not solve the long-term gap, and that with few young workers available the committee had to place less-experienced candidates like A and B into training-track roles.
- Answer: A cost is that E may leave within a few years, so the mentoring is temporary. A benefit is that E's Class IV experience can train newer staff quickly, passing on knowledge before it is lost to retirement.
- Answer: Accept any supported priority. Strong answers name a role that protects public health or compliance first, such as a licensed operator role, and explain the incentive, such as avoiding a coverage gap that could risk a permit violation.
Differentiation
Support
Provide a matching grid with the five roles down one side and the five candidates across the top, so students can mark fits and misfits visually before committing to a placement and writing reasons.
Extension
Ask committees to write a two-sentence hiring plan for the role they could not fill well, describing how they would recruit or train someone over the next year rather than leaving the position open.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "operator license," "instrumentation," "retirement wave," and "qualification" with simple definitions and icons on each candidate card. Allow students to state their matches and reasons aloud to the committee before writing them on the recording sheet.