Builders need on-site presence

Andy Keating is a wanted man.
Before he could lead a visitor around a construction site at Moses Brown School in Providence last week, he was on the phone dealing with a work-related problem. When the tour eventually began, it wasn’t long before Keating’s cell phone rang again. Yet another problem for the project manager overseeing the $6 million job.
“I get a million of those calls,” Keating said after hanging up.
Wearing a hard hat and dressed casually in a slightly dusty Shawmut Design and Construction polo shirt, the 28-year-old didn’t really stand out among the tradesmen he oversees at the work site. But in the construction industry, Keating and others like him are a hot commodity.
With commercial building and renovation work booming, many construction companies are under pressure to find people with the ability to manage projects, from estimating jobs to hiring engineers and contractors to ensuring the job is completed on time.
“There is a talent war right now,” said Wes Cotter, spokesman for Gilbane Building Co., based in Providence. “It’s a war to get those good people.”
While the growing number of construction projects has exacerbated the management shortage, the problem also has to do with perceptions of the industry, some say.
Those interested in getting a college degree in the construction field typically seek to become an architect or an engineer. But Frederick Gould, a professor of construction management at Roger Williams University in Bristol, said last week that project managers are considered equals professionally.
“People imagine construction management being a non-professional, blue-collar, get-dirty type of job,” Gould said. “The thinking is you don’t go to college for that. But it’s so different from that. It’s a great field.”
According to a July 2005 salary survey by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, candidates with a bachelor’s degree in construction science/management received job offers averaging $42,923 a year. The median annual salary of construction managers in May 2004 was $69,870.
Gould, director of the construction management program in Roger Williams’ School of Engineering, said the 20 to 25 students who graduate from the program annually are hired before they leave campus. “We can’t graduate enough to fill the need,” Gould said.
“I think it’s one of the greatest challenges in the construction industry,” said Susan Ehrlich-Kedmi, vice president of people strategies at Boston-based Shawmut, a $700 million construction management firm with offices in Providence.
Indeed, companies such as Shawmut have sometimes recruited in unorthodox places.
Keating majored in art history at Williams College in western Massachusetts, but Ehrlich-Kedmi said he had summer-job experience in construction and he displayed intelligence and a passion for the field. That, plus a background in design, led to a job offer out of college.
Keating accepted as a way to gain some practical experience in the field that would come in handy later, when he planned to obtain a degree in architecture.
Now his plans to become an architect have been scrapped.
In five years of experience, Keating has overseen some major projects, including the building of a 35,000-square-foot, $12 million laboratory for marine research in Woods Hole, Mass., and a 100,000-square-foot Brown University research lab in the former Speidel Building on Ship Street in Providence.
The hours can be long – often 10-hour workdays – but Keating said he loves the autonomy. “I have no one who’s calling me and telling, ‘Do this, don’t do that,’ ” he said. “That can be hair-raising at times, but it suits me.”
A change in career path like the one Keating made is common, according to Gould. Often, engineering and architectural students at Roger Williams make a switch to the construction management program when they learn what the job entails. “We get more transfers going our way instead of the other way,” he said.
Students in the program study math and science, engineering and learn the ins and outs of estimating and scheduling projects. They also minor in business. “Our graduates are business people prepared to solve technical construction projects,” Gould said.
And the learning doesn’t stop there. Companies such as Shawmut and Gilbane, which had $3.3 billion in billing nationwide last year, have internal training programs.
“We realize really good people are our greatest asset,” Cotter said.
At the Moses Brown campus, Keating has been overseeing renovations that required workers to demolish a wing of the three-story Middle House, leaving only the exterior brick walls. “We’re really building a new building inside this fa?ade,” Keating explained. “We’re putting a steel frame inside the old envelope.”
Elsewhere, workers have constructed new classrooms, performing arts studios and faculty offices.
Keating acknowledged that he doesn’t have formal training in engineering and the construction trades – although he said he has “some degree of fluency” — but it is his job to hire the experts in those areas.
And he finds it rewarding.
“I’m not the guy who draws the plans; I’m not the guy who pounds the nails,” Keating said. But without someone like him, “those guys are not going to get together and get a building built,” he added. •