Kerry - I'm kinda in construction as well but on the design side. Actually I started out as an electrician and loved it. I still like working on smaller projects helping out friends and family. At the same time I went to school and got my Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering. For the next 30 years I worked as a consulting engineer for Architectural/Engineering and/or MEP Engineering firms.
17 years was with one international firm based out of London with offices all over the world. I was designing the MEP systems and overseeing construction for projects all over the world. They all require first to meet with the owners and during construction periodic site visits to check on the trades. Few of the projects I worked on near your neck of the woods include Delaware Art Museum and St. Elisabeth's Hospital in DC (it's no longer a hospital - worth looking up). I was also working on projects in China, India, Middle East, England, Ireland, Mexico and Brazil. One of the more interesting projects that I worked on was a mile high building in Jeddah. I designed the entire electrical infrastructure for the complex (very interesting and challenging when it comes to power distribution).
About 6 years ago the firm that I was with for 17 years decided to move out of Cambridge MA to Downtown Boston! I lost my parking spot and now was taking public transportation to work. I did not like that as I hate big cities and not having the ability of driving. For other reasons (and not being able to drive the birds to work
) I switched jobs but I was doing the same thing except now I was working on designing the MEP (more so electrical) infrastructure for the largest internet web search firms (data centers). Unfortunately the travel portion of the job got worse...
Skipping ahead I got involved with a project in downtown Boston for one of the worlds largest financial institutions. The facilities director left and I applied and got his job. It was okay and involved zero travel but I got board (not because I was not traveling but the work was not challenging). The firm also has a real estate division as they own many buildings and campus style complexes all over the states and world. The real estate division is also responsible for all leased sites. All of this equates to many millions S.F. of building space that is constantly evolving. The real estate division is huge with many designers, project mangers, engineers, etc. About a year ago the Director of Engineering retired after 30+ years at the same position... Guess what - I applied and got the Director of Engineering position. So now I'm responsible for all Engineering services for the entire portfolio. When I was doing design work I was maybe responsible for 2-3 large projects at a time but now I have 100s at a time. Obviously I am not involved with the day to day activates and have a large team that oversees the different sites, I still got involved especially when (TSHTF)
A lot of the travel is for project work, new sites, response to incidents, meetings with the sites engineers, FMs and just to familiarize myself with the sites. I love the work and I work from home on the days that I'm not traveling (which is good) but the traveling is part of the job.
