Getting Trained For Construction Management Jobs

Construction Management jobs like that of a Construction Manager are two-fold in scope: you must possess the technical knowledge and skills for the job; and you must know how to manage people too. That is where the difficulty in these jobs comes in -people are flawed and lacking in some departments while exhibiting strength in others. This means the best candidate for the job may be one of the nastiest overseers you have ever met, but man, does he know construction! On the other hand, you might wind up with a candidate who is an all-around good guy (the type of colleague you would readily invite over to your house to meet your family) but who is completely inept and incompetent in technical issues. In a case like this, the better person for the job would be the nasty candidate (though you can always keep in touch with the nicer candidate for leisure pursuits, like joining a weekend bowling club together maybe.)

The technical training you need to be a competent Construction Manager would involve being a college or university graduate of either civil engineering, construction management, or construction science. Here is where some problems at work also start - there are some employees who literally worked their way up from the grungiest lowliest Construction Management jobs in the construction firm and toiled for years just to get to that post. Then, all of a sudden, the top brass go and hire some young yet very smart college graduate and put that new hiree in a higher position than that held by the older employees. Don't laugh -this is an all-too-common situation in many companies. The older employees who started at rock bottom in the company may resent their new Construction Manager for being a) young, b) smart, c) very competent, and d) now has become their new boss. Filing in vacancies for these jobs with employees who are younger than their subordinates has been proven to be a reason to expect problems in the future. It is more of a psychological and social problem though than a technical construction problem.

To resolve this problem, there are employers offering jobs who specify a range of the desired age of any candidates, as well as minimum number of years of experience in the same line of work. This helps give the new hiree a leg up when it comes to integrity and perceived competence for the position. (And it also passes the buck for training a new college graduate to a different firm which is wiling to absorb the risks that come with hiring inexperienced college graduates for Construction Management Jobs.)

Is experience the best teacher for these jobs then? Not necessarily - there are things about Construction Management Jobs you can learn by theory that you will never learn through experience. The best learning process though is one that can harness both formal education and experience together to give the organization the best possible Construction Manager they can get at that time.