Late Career Shifts and Transitions
Attracting and managing talent has long been a challenge for the construction industry. With the ever increasing shortage of skilled construction labor, how do you make sure you leverage the experience of your most knowledgeable people – some of whom are at or nearing retirement age?
Watch our blog this week as Dennis digs deeper into the issue of the skilled labor shortage and presents you with examples of different ways successful contractors are retaining their most experienced talent and leveraging their gifts.
We look forward to hearing your thoughts and comments.
Hello, everybody. Dennis Engelbrecht with Digging Deeper, our pod series trying to dig a little deeper into the construction
issues facing industry professionals today. Today we want to talk about, sort of, late career shifts and transitions and in
one of our previous podcasts, we talked about the fact that, of course, our most experienced people are retiring out of
the industry and that is a problem across the board. So, as we lose that experience, what are some of the other ways that
we can leverage our most experienced people to both train the up and comers, but also to take advantage of that
experience across multiple projects and multiple situations.
One of the things that intuitively didn't sound like it worked, I found several of the members of our Roundtable programs
have had success in taking a senior level superintendent and leveraging them across multiple jobs. In one case, in
particular, that I'm thinking about, they had three schools that were going up in a sort of hundred-mile region and, of
course, this senior super that they had on board would have been the ideal person to run their largest job and be successful
with that. But what they really didn't have, is they didn't have really the right two guys for the next... or the right two
people for the next job. So, what they ended up doing is take three younger, less experienced superintendents and took
their experienced person and made them the superintendent over all three. So almost like a general superintendent role,
but just limited to mentoring those three people through the job and making sure that they gained the experience and
the job still turned out successfully.
As it turned out, this worked exactly as designed. The senior superintendent was able to apply his knowledge through the
pre-con area, make sure in the job turnover and launch meetings that they had great starts, make sure as they got the
subcontractors together in their initial subcontractor meetings on site, that they were there to assure that the junior
superintendent was leading well, delivering a great plan, getting everybody onboard for success of the job. And then they
were also there, available to sit in on the owner meetings for each of the three jobs, scheduling those, of course, at
different times and different days so that they could make themselves available and there to solve some of the tougher
problems, the tougher... whether it was a subcontractor issue or a constructability issue that arose, or questions in the
drawings, helping them review shop drawings for the steel and those sorts of things. Being able to have that knowledge
and apply it and teach three people through the process of superintending this job that maybe was beyond their initial
experience and that they would have had trouble handling alone.
I've seen this now probably work in the last couple years, three or four times and it's been super successful. So, think
about that as a way to really leverage your most experienced people. Put them over two or three jobs. Put that more
junior person under them as a learning experience and I think you'll find success both for your jobs and also the transition
of that knowledge and experience down to the younger folks.
Thanks for listening and again, we welcome your comments. And if you need a transcript of this, tune in, within about 24
hours we should have that available for you. Thanks, and again, Dennis Engelbrecht, Digging Deeper.
