Kid Territory: Jobs: Fixing and Maintaining

C & M workers often find themselves fixing plumbing. Here, a member of the Sun Bear Forest team works on pipes on the roof of the brown bears’ enclosure.

These meerkats make sure there are no spots left on their enclosure window. Window cleaning is part of many B & G workers’ jobs.

It’s important to keep our facilities looking good. Here, a fence in front of the Galápagos tortoise enclosure gets sanded.

What we do

We keep the facilities at the San Diego Zoo and the Wild Animal Park clean and running. Our two departments are officially called Buildings and Grounds and Construction and Maintenance, but everyone uses the initials B & G and C & M. Think of your home and school. Something ALWAYS needs cleaning and fixing, doesn’t it? So imagine keeping up the huge San Diego Zoo and Wild Animal Park. It has hundreds of employees, thousands of animals and plants, and millions of visitors!

We clean, paint, plaster, drive forklifts and other heavy equipment, weld, and do plumbing, concrete, and electrical work. We design, build, and maintain accessories for animal enclosures and employee areas and advise the architects when they design a new area. Some of us are part of a team in special areas of the Zoo, such as Polar Bear Plunge or the Children’s Zoo, so we work closely with the keepers and gardeners too.

What’s cool about this job

We support an organization that’s dedicated to wildlife conservation. There’s such variety to our jobs—we often work all over the Zoo or Park. And we get to use tools! If we work on a team, we stay in one area, but get a lot of variety. Most of us spend a lot of time outdoors around the animals and help behind the scenes. And since we get called when something needs to get cleaned or fixed, everyone is always happy to see us!

Job challenges

For C & M jobs it’s important for us to be problem solvers, because we’ll often get called to build, and then later maintain, something that no one has ever built before. Or we’ll build something and the animals behave unexpectedly and we have to change it. We need to be flexible, since we are very busy with daily and seasonal duties, but have to be ready to help out anywhere. In the early days of the Zoo, people built things and didn’t always write everything down, like the locations of pipes, so we still get surprises sometimes when we dig.

Some of the B & G jobs are part time, especially when you start out, and there are very early and late hours shifts.

How this job helps animals

We provide animals with drinkers, shelters, heaters, and drains—the elements that make their enclosures good places to live, where animals are healthy and safe. Some of us work where visitors can see us, so we try to answer questions about the animals from our guests. Our visitors often comment on the cleanliness of our facilities, which is an important part of having a good visitor experience, and hopefully future visits too!

How to get a job like this

B & G is an entry-level job, so you can start as young as 16, working seasonally and part time. For C & M positions you need a job skill, on a journeyman level, which you get by working in the field, or going to a trade school. There are schools for trades such as electrician and welder. And since you work with many people, you need a good "people" personality, which also helps you get along faster in your career.