The Women of ABC (WABC) hosted its annual Professional Career Day for 11 young women from various local high schools at Southway Builders’ City Arts 2, a working job site.
The focus of the day was to educate the young women on the career opportunities available in the construction industry, as well as to introduce them to how a job site functions. Several guest speakers, including Polly Dukes, Senior Vice President of Construction and Design for Homes for America owner of the City Arts 2 project, Malinidi Lankatilleke and Sally Granger with Southway Builders, Tina Pogliani with Hord Coplan Macht, and Alice Storm Jones with Floura Teeter landscape architects, explained their roles in the project.
The project managers took the young women on an interactive tour of the project where they learned about the project’s budget and scheduling, the urban landscape considerations/challenges and the design parameters. At the end of the tour, they were able to work with one of the drones on the jobsite that is used to track the progress of the project and for marketing. Once the tour commenced, the women broke into groups and put their new knowledge to use with a scheduling activity where they were given an exercise of ordering 15 major project milestones start to end.
At the end of the day, the WABC women discussed the college-scholarship opportunity the committee awards young women interested in pursuing a career in construction. For the scholarship, visit here: wabc-scholarship-2017.
A special thanks goes out to the Southway Builders team, WABC Chairs Emily Rucinski with Hertzbach and Lisa Sparks with Wright, Constable & Skeen for organizing the event.