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How important is design experience for Project Mgmt? 4

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MaxwellsDemon

Mechanical
Nov 9, 2012
2
Is first-hand design experience required if I eventually want to do construction project management or larger program management?

If design exp is needed, how does one get a comprehensive general engineering knowledge when companies only offer very specialized engineer positions (like URS asking for Hydraulic engineers or CH2M Hill asking for HVAC and then you're pigeonholed)?


And any insight into the requirements/typical career paths for construction project management would be helpful!
 
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I believe that a construction project (I assume you refer to buildings, not industry) are fed with the architecture design and the structure engineering design, as the two major set of plans and specifications. To have experience in this fields is an important requirement to manage a construction project, so , being an architect or a structural engineer are the professionals that may suit well for the job. If you come from the mechanical engineering field, and maybe got experience in the design of installations (hvac, fire protection, etc.) you could get into project managemente at some point. I think it takes years of experience to lead a big project.
 
It's not at all important unless you want to be a good Project manager. :)
As far as how the big firms hire, they hire for specific needs and promote from those hires the engineers with an aptitude for project management.
It's not always the best technical people who make good PMs, but you need to speak the lingo. Otherwise you're going to miss big mistakes or not be able to challenge the discipline engineers when they're feeding you a load.
 
No such question has a B/W answer. There are successful managers who surround themselves with trusted experts, there are unsuccessful managers who thought they had surrounded themselves with trusted experts, there are successful engineers who sucked at being bigger managers.

Even though the companies cited are hiring for those specific positions, if you can do well in them, you can potentially ask for and get different assignments in different subdisciplines.

TTFN
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7ofakss
 
A few semi-random thoughts:

Coming in from the engineering side as you are, I think some design experience is desirable, but not required, for construction project management. Designing will teach you things the typical construction management major will never learn (the reverse is also true). In addition, design experience will make it possible for you to obtain professional licensure, which may give you a leg up on trying to get such a position in the future. Most of the engineers I have met over the years who do construction had at least a few years in design plus their professional license. On the other hand, one of the best CMs I ever met had a degree in ChemEngr, but his first job out of college was in the construction division of a major city's wastewater department (or was it the wastewater division of the city's construction department?). When I met him he had about 30 years of wastewater construction experience all over the country and zero design experience and zero ChemEngr practice. As he explained it to me, early in his career he paid very close attention to all things construction, asked lots and lots of questions, and did lots and lots of self study on his own time.

You are more likely to get broad experience and not be pigeon-holed in a small company or in one of the smaller offices in a big company. I can safely say that the breadth of my experience comes from working on lots of small projects at a small company and on small- to medium-sized projects in smaller offices of a medium-sized company that was then purchased by a huge company. I have never worked in an office with more than 35 people total and have never worked on a project with a fee greater than $3M. I have managed projects with fees ranging from under $500 (seriously) to about $750,000 plus one multi-year, multi-phase project that was about $2.5M. Even in these settings, I have been temporarily and partially pigeon-holed a couple of times when I got really good at cookie-cutter repeat projects, but it didn't last forever. In a really large company, as you have discovered, it is much easier to get pigeon-holed and often harder to get un-pigeon-holed.

Sometimes the managers in these big companies are clueless as to how ridiculous they are about pigeon-holing. Not quite 20 years ago, I began a three-year stint with a large company. I was in a three-person office that operated directly under a 100+ person office about 200 miles away. I had been hired based on my water system experience, but my resume included lots of non-water experience. One day I had prepared a draft proposal for installing 1/2-mile of 8" sewer and reconstructing the street above it for a local city. I emailed it to my supervisor for his review. He called me back about an hour later, told me the fee looked good, then asked who I had selected as my transporation engineer. I said no-one, that I planned to do that work myself. He said, "But, you're a water guy," to which I responded "And I have 8 years of experience doing street projects for cities around here". He repeated, "But, you're a water guy." It took a few times for him to understand that not only did I have the requisite experience, but the project was too small to justify adding a second engineer who was in another office. It was pavement replacement between existing curbs and gutters. It was NOT a transportation project. I got a similar reaction when I asked for a copy of AutoCad: "But, you're an engineer." I finally convinced them that I needed a way to open and even edit drawings emailed to me by the CadOps in the big office and that my AutoCad abilities probably exceeded their least experienced CadOps. Plus, I do a lot of design in AutoCad prior to getting the CadOps involved. All-in-all, I'm glad I only suffered three years there.

==========
"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill
 
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