Commercial construction vs Industrial Construction

A lot more is involved. Depending on your situation, you probably have a lot of control over all phases of the PDP. Heavy industrial, you just put it together. Your PM and Engineer will be the driver.

You aren’t going to find many, if any, industrial contractors in San Antonio. There will be a learning curve for sure. Depends what sector of industrial you are looking to get into also. Mechanical and civil are way different.

If you have worked in framing but want to get into industrial, your best bet would probably to look into scaffolding. It wouldn’t have as much of a learning curve. I did the industrial CM track at LSU and currently work industrial and its vastly different from commercial

Pay is significantly better in industrial with your amount of experience. You will move around a lot more in industrial though. Lots of work in Texas though.

You’re mainly running just you’re guys as a framing guy. You would have better experience being a GC pm due to running multiple subs. But even that is vastly different than industrial. Culture and owners are different breed. Much more hands on and safety centric. Plus you have different areas of industrial. Specialty contractors, civil, and mechanical are all different from each other. You have a long road ahead but better to do it young than wait.

I agree with the learning curve anytime you change sectors and also the person that said 3 years in you are basically still a college grad to an industrial contractor.

I’ve been in industrial for under 5 years (all on the same project) and still feel like I know nothing because any new part I’m working on is brand new to me.

If you don’t mind the travel and uncertainty on the next project, you can make a killing in industrial.

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Certainly a good bit of work in nearby Corpus so likely some will have offices in San Antonio

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No, not the case at all. I know the industrial sector. The only company I know of in San Antone is Zachry, but they do zero industrial work in San Antone. They do other sectors of construction besides industrial and that is their headquarters but no one else. Corpus has a good bit, but there is zero industrial work in San Antone so no industrial contractors there.

So I work for a commercial construction company and we’ve done a shite ton of commercial style buildings in plants (offices, control rooms, warehouses). It’s basically like building a normal building for us, except you have to do it wearing a space suit, gloves, goggles, safety glasses, respirator, hard hat, and literally any other type of PPE you can imagine. Then you have to have modified tools that may have any kind of guard or safety device you can imagine. Also you can’t go up more than 2 steps on a ladder without being harnessed/tied off and someone on fire watch. Also there’s a very overzealous and overeager safety man making it his literal life mission to see you taking a step more on your ladder than is permitted, or using your tools in any normal way you may have become accustomed to. Also slow your speed to about 50% and lower your daily progress to roughly a quarter of what you do on a commercial job...

And get paid about 3x as much as you make being a commercial framer.

That’s pretty much it.

Yeah, you nailed it, but there isn’t much “framing” going on in industrial. There are a few contractors who do building type work, but it’s not like it’s an all day everyday steady type thing.

Industrial owners regularly push the start date back for one of a million reasons but want you to maintain the same finish date, but the safety requirements make everything drag out 5x as long and drive the price up. Then the owner wants to know what they can do to cut costs and ask for contractor feedback. When you give them feedback that the safety reqs are what drives it up, they say safety can’t be changed so it never changes and the rules keep driving it up but they won’t cut back on it.