- January 7, 2025
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Summer is almost here, and like the many labor sectors facing staffing shortages, Volusia County Beach Safety is seeking lifeguards, particularly to work part-time.
With 70 full-time staff on board and a budget that will allow for 300 part-time lifeguards, Beach Safety Director Andrew Ethridge said his division is looking to fill about 100 part-time lifeguards positions.
"I'm constantly looking at new strategies to try and entice people to get in here to work," he said. "We're looking at potentially different work shifts, we're looking at potentially different improvements to the work environment. We're trying to think of bonuses and different types of incentives that are out of the box that will get these kids excited about coming into work and doing what they do."
In December 2021, the Volusia County Council approved a three-year bargaining agreement with the International Union of Police Associations for pay raises and a $2,000 retention bonus for beach safety specialists. The raises increased the minimum hourly pay to $16.65 for beach safety specialists, $21.10 for senior lifeguards and $25.51 for lifeguard supervisors.
And that has helped with the retention of full-time staff, Ethridge said, and the division is now only seeing "normal turnover."
Starting pay for summer lifeguards is $13.24 an hour with a $500 bonus for qualifying individuals, according to the county website.
During peak times of the year, such as the Fourth of July and Memorial Day holidays, Volusia County staffs close to 100 lifeguard towers. How do they choose which areas of the beach are guarded?
Ethridge said it's a result of both historical data for the busiest stretches of beach and daily observations, and it changes as the area does.
"Where one year we may have an area that is absolutely desolate because it's a vacant lot, the next year, we may have a 30-story hotel there," Ethridge said. "... So we use all this information to try and predict and try and be ahead of the trends."
Staffing shortages for Volusia County Beach Safety also means cutting towers, but with a priority list in place, the hope is that the mobile roving units will fill in the gaps in less crowded or less priority stretches of beach.
"Every one of my employees with the exception of my administrative staff are certified lifeguards, so every one of them are out there looking for people in trouble, as well as many other duties that they're responsible for," Ethridge said.
Tryouts for summer lifeguards are happening soon, with the recruit classes scheduled for June 13-17. The 2022 tryout dates are as follow:
Visit volusia.org/beach for more information.
