This foundation tries to get young Californians into transportation jobs

UC Berkeley professor Susan Shaheen has sent over a dozen students to the Education Symposium, a two-day conference that exposes college juniors and seniors in California to careers in transportation. 

During the event, students learn about the transportation industry, get matched with a mentor, meet with practitioners in the field and participate in a competition. At the end, they’re eligible to apply for three Education Symposium scholarships to enter the industry.

The symposium is organized by the California Transportation Foundation, a non-profit started by Heinz Heckeroth, a former deputy director for the California Department of Transportation. The foundation works to make students interested in transportation careers, offering dozens of scholarships to students to enter the field, among other things. 

“My perception has been that a lot of people who go to it are very inspired,” Shaheen, who is on the board for the foundation, said. “You’re hearing from people who are really senior in the field, and they’re talking to you, they’re focused on you, they’re answering your questions, and working side-by-side with you on a project for the symposium.”

As part of this year’s symposium, held in Fresno in November, students participated in a mock grant competition, designing proposals to address sustainable transportation. 

“Transportation is not necessarily the sexiest career choice,” said Marnie Primmer, the executive director for the foundation.  “It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that maybe some other career choices open to students,  but that’s why our education symposium is such a great opportunity, because it introduces students to what it’s really like to be a transportation professional.”

Part of what makes the program successful is the type of mentors it’s able to recruit, according to Primmer and Shaheen. These include people working in both the public and private sectors and academia. They range from engineers to planners to policymakers and many of them are high-ranking in their sphere, with several former directors of Caltrans serving as mentors.

A key challenge Primmer faces with courting students is helping them understand exactly what jobs there are in the transportation industry: everything from the engineers that design highways to the policymakers that plan public transit systems to the maintenance workers who keep the systems functioning.

In the past few years, the industry has seen a dip in students interested in transportation, Primmer said. For example, engineering students have opted for careers in software engineering instead of civil engineering. However, this is changing as students seek more hands-on careers, she said. 

“If you work on a highway project, or you work on a new transit system, you actually get to see the fruits of your labor and the impact that it makes on your community,” she said. “With many students who are interested in passion projects, and in connecting their purpose with their career, civil engineering becomes a much more attractive opportunity, because you’re actually seeing the results of the work you put in.”

Many of Shaheen’s students are interested in sustainable transportation, particularly since she directs the Innovative Mobility Research lab at the Transportation Sustainability Research Center at Berkeley. “With any transition, the jobs do change,” she said. “When we go from horse and carriage to car, there’s major changes. And when you make changes to electronics, to the sensing systems, or the propulsion systems and how they’re fueled, that involves education and workforce development.” 

Another major shift in the industry, perhaps the biggest one, is self-driving cars, Primmer said. Google, Apple, Ford, Mercedes, Tesla, Honda, Toyota and more are all working on self-driving programs. 

“I think that technology is advancing in a way that will be transformative for transportation in the next 5 to 10 years,” she said. “But I do think that opens up new opportunities for students who are tech savvy and who are willing to be the bridge between how we’ve always done things, and how we’re going to do things in the future.”

Primmer says one of the most important ways to attract students to the industry is storytelling, which helps them put it in perspective. 

“It’s the foundation of everything we do,” she said. “You can’t get to your dentist appointment, you couldn’t get there if you didn’t have a good transportation network. Your access to education, your access to good paying jobs, your access to amenities in your community, is all dependent on a functioning transportation network.”