When the boom times end - baby - NRPA Perspectives

When the baby boom generation begins to retire later this decade, there will be large holes to fill in the park and recreation agency ranks. Are we ready? With 76 million baby boomers, compared to 46 million in the succeeding generation, the numbers alone indicate that we'll face a problem.

For the past 30 years, park and recreation jobs have been filled by baby boomers who have retained their love of our field. Folks have stuck with parks and recreation jobs through lean and fat budget years, through high and low crime, through hot and cold political support, through the loss of open space to rampant development. Despite everything, people in parks and recreation, by and large, love their work and have stayed. This fact is about to change, rapidly, owing to demographics and an aging workforce.

With public park and recreation jobs mostly filled by boomers for the past three decades, university faculty in parks and recreation schools have often directed their students to look for jobs in the commercial, rather than public sector. Many of the schools have morphed into offering sports management and hospitality and tourism management degrees, because that's where the jobs were, or were perceived to be.

The options, then, are that public park and recreation jobs will go unfilled, they'll be filled by people not educated in parks and recreation management or younger professionals will move up the career ladder faster than before.

Most agencies in our field haven't had to deal with large-scale turnover since World War II, so they haven't developed succession plans or recruitment programs. This problem is compounded by the fact that most young people today aren't thinking about a career in public parks and recreation. (If they think about recreation at all, it's to dream of being a sports superstar, like Mike.) They're simply unaware of the thousands of potential jobs in public parks and recreation that will be opening during the next decade.

NRPA and our various professional branches should be gearing up for a major education, recruitment and career-planning campaign to assure that the next generation of young people will have ample information about potential career opportunities in public parks and recreation.

We need to find corporate or philanthropic support for more, and better paid, student internships, and advertise them widely. Educators should return to promoting career opportunities in public parks and recreation. Field professionals should seek and welcome mentoring opportunities with college students as well as local junior and senior high school students.

Educators in our field are also baby boomers, and will also be retiring from their schools of park and recreation management. Mostly for the same reasons that their graduates haven't found public park and recreation jobs, there aren't enough Ph.D. graduates in parks and recreation management to fill the university faculty jobs that will be coming open. We need to find ways to encourage some of the field professionals with masters degrees to return to school for their Ph.D. in park and recreation management. Again, an NRPA scholarship program would help.

An especially good opportunity exists to connect the work that NRPA is doing with urban park agencies and youth programs to create a continuum of education, community service and career-development opportunities for youth. To date, we've primarily focused on the role of parks and recreation in preventing the myriad of problems facing urban youth--teen crime, pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse, etc. We should begin to make career development in the field of parks and recreation one of the planned outcomes.

We need the help of all park and recreation professionals to make solutions to this mega-issue a reality.

T. Destry Jarvis
Executive Director

COPYRIGHT 2002 National Recreation and Park Association
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group