Ana and Marcus, Five Years Out: Two Paths Into Water Careers

Two Paths From the Same High School

Ana and Marcus sat two rows apart in the same senior English class, and neither one had given much thought yet to where water came from before it reached a faucet. Five years later, both of them think about it every working day, though their jobs look almost nothing alike.

Ana went straight from graduation into a job as an operator-in-training at her city's water treatment plant. For the first two years, she worked alongside licensed operators, learning the plant's pumps, chemical feed systems, and testing equipment on the job, while studying for the state certification exam that would let her work unsupervised. She passed the exam, earned her Class II operator license, and now runs rounds through the plant on her own, checking readings, running bench tests, and logging results that the state reviews as legal documents. Her pay is now close to the national median for water and wastewater treatment operators, reported at about $60,020 a year, and she expects it to keep climbing as she works toward a higher license class.

Marcus took a different route. He enrolled in a four-year university engineering program, choosing environmental engineering because he liked the idea of designing the systems that treat water rather than running them day to day. College meant four more years of tuition, math, and chemistry courses before he ever set foot in a treatment plant as an employee. Now he works as an engineer-in-training at a design firm, sizing filter systems and chemical feed equipment under the supervision of a licensed engineer, while he logs the experience he needs to sit for the Professional Engineer exam. Only after passing that exam will he be able to stamp his own designs and take legal responsibility for them, a milestone still a few years away.

Neither path was faster or easier than the other; each simply front-loaded its training differently. Ana's training happened on the job, paid, from her first day of work. Marcus's training happened largely in a classroom, unpaid in the sense that he was a student rather than an employee, but it opened design and research doors that the operator path does not lead toward directly. Some of Ana's colleagues took a third route entirely: one supervisor at her plant is finishing a master's degree part time, aiming for a research position studying how contaminants move through groundwater, a path that typically starts with the same kind of bachelor's degree Marcus completed and adds several more years of graduate study.

The water sector needs people entering all three paths at once. The table below shows part of the reason why.

Table: Selected facts about the water operator workforce

All of those projected openings come from replacing workers who retire or move to other jobs. Total operator employment is projected to decline slightly over the decade. Utilities across the country are trying to recruit new operators, new engineers, and new researchers fast enough to replace a generation that is reaching retirement age all at once, which is one reason the sector describes every one of these paths, not just one, as urgently needed.

Ana and Marcus still eat lunch together sometimes. Neither one thinks the other made the lesser choice.

1. What two education paths did Ana and Marcus take after high school?
2. According to the passage, what steps did Ana take before she could work as a fully licensed operator?
3. What does the table give as the national median annual pay for water and wastewater treatment operators, and how does Ana's pay compare to that figure?
4. Why does the passage say the water sector expects thousands of operator job openings every year, even though total operator employment is projected to decline?
5. Which path, Ana's or Marcus's, includes a state licensing exam, and which includes a national professional engineering exam?
6. Based on details in the passage, explain one reason a student might prefer the operator path and one reason a student might prefer the engineering path.
7. Find two details in the passage that support the idea that neither Ana's nor Marcus's path is a lesser option than the other.