After gaining real hands-on experience in the industrial construction field, the next step was to move into the company's project estimating division.  A project estimator uses project documents and drawings created by an industrial engineering firm to quantify the work and cost required to construct the project.  They then compile the pricing and contractual documents into a bid to compete against other firms for selection to execute the contract and do the actual construction.

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Industrial electrical projects range in size from an email briefly explaining what turns out to be $1,000 worth of construction to a terabyte of data worth of drawings, specifications, material lists, models, and schedules of what turns out to be a project in the hundreds of millions of dollars.  For some industrial projects, total construction costs, factoring in civil, structural, mechanical and electrical, often exceed multiple billions of dollars.

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The task of organizing, analyzing, and quantifying construction project documents is daunting and never the same.  I often compare construction projects to snowflakes; no two are alike.  It's the project estimator's job to make sense of these snowflakes and translate them into usable data. 

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For a year, I was an intern working within my company's state of the art estimating department.  This is one of the first industrial construction companies to create a completely autonomous division within itself to handle project estimating alone.  In many ways, this division has revolutionized how things are done in the industry as many other companies have created similar departments after seeing its value.

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This was my first true taste of office life.  The estimating group was about forty strong and filled with like-minded people.  There are many things that can be learned in an office that aren't directly related to the job at hand.

 

After a year of internship, I was hired as a full time estimator and remained in this role for about another two years.  During this time, I was able to observe and analyze the intricacies of not only the technical details of industrial electrical and instrumentation, but those of management and team organization.  Not to mention, I became an expert at computer operation and email communication.

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I believe my positive attitude and ability to quickly learn and adapt put me in a unique light to management.  For most of my estimating career, management selectively assigned to me the least fun, least engineered (unclear), and smallest projects.  For reference, being assigned well engineered and larger projects was considered prestigious.  Regardless, I always accepted with a smile and produced.  It may not be the best way to look at the situation, but I considered my projects challenging learning experiences and feel as though struggling through multiple hundreds of small projects, diverse in nature, was a drastically better learning experience than the alternative.  

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Although the technicalities of industrial construction captivated me, management techniques and team operations peaked (and continue to peak) my interest.  It quickly became apparent that even with similar values, keeping a group of >30 people happy and working together productively is quite complex.

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My overall takeaways from the experience as a project estimator:

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• Improved "office" social abilities and email communication skills

• Learning the technicalities of industrial engineering and its range of formats

• Problem solving and logical reasoning with the constraint of hard deadlines

• Learning how to analyze and convert complex data packages into usable forms

• Observing management techniques for team building and operational organization

• Improved computer operation

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Last updated 04.02.20 - PJ

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