Construction Managers

Managing Construction

anything specific your "friend" wants to know? Residential, commercial, or industrial?

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How would you describe a normal day in your profession?

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Dealing with b$tching welders, foreign engineers, business executives who don't know their arse from a skyhook, and the assorted dregs of society for 11 hours a day while you try to actually do the real work they supposedly pay you to do: dick around on excel and write RFI's.

On site for 6:15 am, walk the site for a couple hours, positioning subs where manpower needs to be concentrated, and handing out approved changes/RFI's to whoever needs them, back in the trailer for ~11 am. Write whatever RFI's needed for the problems discovered on my "morning walk" (if there were any). Usually have some bs meeting with an underperforming sub or a vendor before lunch.

After lunch, walk the site for a couple hours again, noticing what has been/hasn't been done compared to what I asked for that particular day. Most subs go home by 3pm, so that's when I usually go back to the trailer.

Spend 3pm-5/6pm studying the schedule and production tracking to figure out what/who needs to be pushed that week. Also use this time to update daily reports and project schedules.


As a superintendent I'm an adult babysitter, fact checker and problem solver.

Never go to our actual home office if I can help it.

Eta: I'm in commercial, with a GC fwiw. Building a middle school right now.

There's some more involved bullshite that goes on with complicated change orders, owners meetings, sit downs with subs, my project staff, etc. That's boring shite though.

Meetings, babysitting subcontractors, mediating disputes that really shouldn't occur, playing in golf tournaments.

Are you wanting to be in the field as a superintendent or more office like a project manager? I've done both.

Superintendent- long hours basically babysitting adults and making sure they are doing what they contractually agreed to.

Project Manager- lots of talking on the phone asking adults why they didn't do what they contractually agreed to. Plus lots of report writing and budgeting both teams and money for the project.

Currently I'm a deep foundations inspector. Besides the hours this project I am on right now, I love it.

Meetings, babysitting, listening to bitching, walk around and check my projects, sort priorities and filter down to my contractors. I probably spend 80% in my office fricking off when we're slow, and probably 50% when we're busy.

CM is a degree that you can pretty much do anything you want in construction. Residential, Commercial, Industrial, Heavy Civil, Piping, Structural Steel. etc. etc. You can either work in project management of some sort or estimating. What was said earlier about being experienced to be a manager is correct. Working in the field, you'll start out scheduling, writing daily reports/RFI's, timesheets/payroll, or purchasing and spending as much time as possible doing walk-down's and trying to learn the field you are in. If you're in estimating you'll be sending out RFQ packages, preliminary schedules, and doing takeoffs. The downside is you're a desk jockey 95% of the time with the occasional site visit or out of office meeting. The positive for that is you work normal hours, out of the heat/cold all day, and usually work from a main office instead of traveling from job to job. I've worked both field project management and estimating now in my 12+ years and prefer estimating, you have to be a good people person to be a PM. It really is a babysitting job most of the time whether it be your own people, subs, or clients. Eventually you get tired of working with some of those people and the bullshite they bring to you on a daily basis at 6am after you drove and hour to get to the jobsite. With estimating you get a package on your desk, usually bid it within a month or so, get instant results of your work win or lose, then move onto the next one. Depending on what size company you're with, you may have to help get the project going with contract buyouts, submittals, and purchasing. Smaller company PM's usually wear all the hats, estimate & manage. Being a traveling PM has benefits in pay, but not very conducive to family life.

Main thing is CM is knowledge based, knowledge you learn outside of school. If you've worked in the field at all, which is preferable, use your knowledge to expand in that field. You could always change fields, but you'll have to learn a whole new type of construction. I.E. going from commercial interior work to heavy civil/structural.