Roxbury Community College, state, launch new energy auditor training program
A new program from Roxbury Community College, with state and federal support, will bring new career paths to students looking to enter green technology fields.
The program, announced Nov. 5, comes out of the state’s Department of Energy Resources from a $2 million federal grant. That funding is being directed toward the development of a program to train energy auditors at Roxbury Community College, as well as Greenfield Community College in western Massachusetts.
It’s work that could be of high importance for meeting climate goals in the city and state, said Salvador Pina, dean of workforce development at Roxbury Community College.
“Buildings are one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses, so if you think about all the buildings we have in Boston, and the ability for us to create an impact, understanding how buildings are using their energy efficiently is key,” Pina said.
The program will train energy auditors — professionals who identify how a building’s energy use is working and how it could be improved — to work with small and medium-sized commercial buildings, which the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, the state’s quasi-public clean energy agency, identified as an area of particular need in Massachusetts.
Those buildings might include retail spaces, nonprofits or small-scale municipal buildings, rather than large skyscrapers.
“The energy efficiency solutions that help these buildings be more energy efficient are probably closer to the types of solutions in the residential space,” said Raija Vaisanen, deputy managing director of workforce development at the Clean Energy Center. “We spoke to contractors that do this work and folks who have union signatory contractors in the space. It seemed like there was a need to help prepare workers to do this work.”
The money under the federal grant, part of a federal Energy Auditor Training Grant Program under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, is slated for the next two years. In that time, as the two community colleges start up their programs, the state plans to hire a curriculum developer to work on creating an established direction of study for the field that can be expanded to other institutions in the state.
The program builds on existing coursework at RCC. This fall, the community college launched a program to train energy auditors to work in residential properties.
RCC recently graduated its first cohort of about 10 students from that residential auditor program and is currently working to help those students find jobs. Pina said he expects the college to run four or five cohorts of that program. Each cohort studies in the classroom for about four weeks and then has one week with hands-on experience in the field.
Developing a new program off that existing one will help get this new coursework off the ground sooner, Pina said, pointing to lessons the college learned the first time around regarding things like how to market the program to students so they understand what they’ll be learning and what will make them successful in the program.
“The biggest challenge for us is going to be recruiting the students, because these are occupations that people don’t know a lot about,” he said. “There’s what we call a career exploration component to it, where we have to spend time helping people understand the career and what the training is all about.”
Being able to build off existing training is also part of how the state envisions the program being developed, Vaisanen said. The vision for the plan includes developing a curriculum that can bring students from residential audit training into the commercial space.
As the city and state continue working to address climate change and move toward net zero emissions, energy auditor roles, alongside other jobs in the space, will be important to reaching those goals, Vaisanen said. Developing that workforce will require bringing in people who are new to the field, but also expanding the skillset of people working in adjacent roles like those working to weatherize buildings or those in the construction industry, she said.
“We need 34,000 workers across a number of occupations, including energy auditors, in the state, to meet our climate goals by 2050,” Vaisanen said, citing a 2023 workforce needs assessment from the Commission. “That’s going to require a number of different skilling approaches.”
The new training program will also expand economic opportunities for Roxbury Community College students, Pina said, opening careers in the climate space to Boston’s Black and brown residents as they develop.
Vaisanen, too, pointed to roles in the space as a solid job and career path.
“Energy auditor jobs are, you know, largely good jobs that pay pretty well and can be on a pathway to additional sort of careers in the building space,” she said.
To support new students, Vaisanen said that the state is aiming to include wraparound supports in the curriculum and program it develops to reduce barriers to employment for those seeking to enter the field.
For an industry that is rapidly growing and seeing efforts to increase the diversity of its workforce, Pina said the chance for Black and brown community members to enter the field as its starting is an exciting opportunity.
“As the industry is growing, these folks have an opportunity to grow with the industry and learn new skill sets; ultimately that means moving to higher paying jobs and jobs with more responsibility,” Pina said. “It’s an opportunity that doesn’t happen a lot for folks in high poverty areas and students of color to get in on the ground floor.”
