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Transcript

Who Programs Your Building in 2035? The BAS Workforce Cliff · NOXTalks

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Knox Talks, the AI-generated podcast exploring the groundbreaking ways technology shapes our built environment.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: Today we're diving into a question most owners never ask until it's too late.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_00: Who's going to program your building in 2035?
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: Which actual human can open your BAS, read the logic, and fix it at 2 in the morning when the chillers won't stage?
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the uncomfortable part.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: The pipeline behind that person is, well, thin.
• 0:36
  SPEAKER_00: Some numbers.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_00: JLL's 2025 research found that 39% of U.S.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: facility managers are over 55, against 28% in JLL's comparison across occupations.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: So facilities managers are older than the workforce overall.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: Upstream Associated Builders and Contractors reports more than one in five construction workers are 55 or older.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_00: And inside building controls, the U.S.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Department of Energy identifies a critical need for more people entering the energy management and control systems field.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: A 2025 Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory paper finds the operations workforce commonly lacks the ability to use the BAS for troubleshooting.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: It names retirements and scarce hands-on training among the causes, with vendor reliance as a result.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: And LBL notes classroom education tends to deliver the basics, while higher-level skills, analyzing faults, evaluating fixes, are normally built through years of field experience.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: So a lot of practical controls competency lives in people, and it takes a long time to grow.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Now look at what employers want.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Pull up postings for a building automation controls programmer, and you'll see things like two years of BAS programming using Tritium Niagara, plus proficiency in BACnet, LawnWorks, and Modbus.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: That's a narrow, hard-won skill set, and a lot of postings are chasing the same thin pool.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: So why is this overlooked?
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because it gets filed under Skills Gap, which sounds like a problem for trade schools, but the owner's exposure shows up in three very concrete ways.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: First, integrator dependency.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: One firm installed your system, and that firm holds the passwords, the licenses, the backups, and critically, the only people who understand how it was built.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a vendor relationship.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: That's a single point of failure with an invoice.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: Second, knowledge trapped in one head.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_00: Plenty of operators know a building where one programmer customized the sequences over 15 years and never wrote any of it down.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_00: The third floor AHU has an override nobody understands.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: The morning warmup has a hard-coded offset, and the day that person retires, every one of those quirks becomes a mystery.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: You can't hire your way out of that in a quarter.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Third, contract leverage.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: When only one company can touch your controls, you're not negotiating anymore.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_00: You're accepting.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: This hits up time and cost directly.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it means waiting days, even weeks, for the right control specialist.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Comfort complaints because nobody dares touch a sequence they can't read.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: Energy drift because tuning stopped when the last person who understood the logic left.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_00: So what can an owner do?
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Three things, none of which require a new platform.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: 1.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: Make documentation a contract deliverable, not a courtesy.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_00: Current, version controlled, programming backups, annotated sequences of operations.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: Ashray Guideline 13 already covers program configuration and documentation, so lean on it, and write in the word current because commissioning day AS built are history, not a maintenance tool.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: If the logic changes, the documentation changes with it, or the invoice doesn't get paid.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: 2.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Avoid lock-in for the people, not just the platform.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: BACNET was designed to let equipment from different manufacturers exchange information.
• 4:09
  SPEAKER_00: That's valuable, but interoperability isn't the same thing as serviceability.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: A BACNET controller can still require proprietary programming tools, credentials, or specialist knowledge.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So you can solve protocol lock-in and still end up with human lock-in.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Make sure your organization, not the vendor, controls the admin credentials and recovery path under proper access control and keep your own backups.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: And write the contract and architecture so a second firm can actually service the system rather than assuming an open protocol got you there.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: 3.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: Train your existing team to at least read the sequences, not write them, read them.
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_00: A facilities technician who can open a Niagara station, follow a control loop, and say, that's not what the sequence says it should do is worth a lot.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: That's calling the integrator with a diagnosis versus a symptom.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: And it's the seed of a real apprenticeship pathway.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_00: Building automation isn't really a technology asset, it's a knowledge asset that runs on a computer.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hardware can be replaced.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_00: Reconstructing years of undocumented logic and site knowledge is far harder.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: So if your building's logic lives in one person's head or on one vendor's laptop, then you don't own your building's brain, you're renting it, and the lease expires on someone else's retirement date.