The Alaska Contractor - Summer 2008

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subcontract you need on your job,” she said. “As the project goes on, you don’t have all your pre-stuff you’ve got to do, so it’s just basically follow-up. Bit by bit, it gets more where you’re out in the field and you get to do more out in the field. Plus, there’s more out in the field that you’ve got to keep track of.” Warren said the skills she acquired in the classroom now help her considerably when she is faced with paperwork on the job. She is able to develop spreadsheets for quantity calculations and other tasks, which enables her to streamline her paper workload considerably. “Once you develop it, you have it,” she said, “and you don’t have to do it again. You just enter in your numbers and the spreadsheet does it for you. That makes it kind of nice, to be able to develop that stuff to help you out.” Warren said the CM courses offered her tutelage in basic, general project management. She took courses that covered such topics as soils, cost estimating, civil and architectural drafting, construction law, financial management and statics. Courses in the CM curriculum are closely tied to the industry that needs and supports it, Callahan has said. The curriculum was designed in accordance with requirements of the American Council for Construction Education, according to UAA’s CM Web site. Callahan and other architectural and engineering technology faculty at UAA first discussed the possibility of forming a CM program in 2001, but a needsassessment survey done the following year by UAA’s David E. Gunderson, Dr. Jang W. Ra, Dr. Herb Schroeder and H.R. Holland accelerated their efforts, sparking conversations between industry and academia representatives and bringing forth Alaska’s first CM program. The survey stated that while Alaska’s construction industry contributes 7.5 percent of a $24.4-billion gross state product, and is expected to experience a 27-percent increase in employment from 2005 to 2045, the closest postsecondary construction education program was situated 2,435 miles away, at the University of Washington. Alaska was one of seven states – Delaware, Hawaii, New Hampshire, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming – without a CM program. The other states (with the exception of Hawaii) were located within 260 miles of a university with a CM program, however. “The purpose of this research effort was to investigate the perceived needs of Alaskan contractors in hiring entry level construction management personnel,” according to the survey. Ninety-nine people in the construction industry – most of them general contractors – returned their surveys, which indicated the need for approximately 31 CM graduates annually. Respondents said they would be willing to pay an average starting annual salary of $39,004 to someone with little or no experience, but an average starting salary of $42,233 to a CM graduate with six months of internship work experience. “The required skills identified in the survey will be used as a basis to develop a new construction management program curriculum specific to the unique Alaskan environment,” wrote the survey authors. “These findings correlate well with existing research that predicts the supply and demand for construction education graduates nationwide and indicate the need for a Construction Management Bachelor of Science degree program in Alaska.” Salary levels for construction managers in this state have risen considerably. The annual mean wage for the 880 construction managers employed in Alaska in May 2007 was $96,790, according to figures compiled that month by the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. Those figures did not include information about the number of years of collegelevel coursework those construction managers had completed. The top-paying state, according to those statistics, was New York, with an annual mean wage of $122,580 for construction managers. Callahan was teaching in a two-year AET program back when the Gunderson needs assessment survey emerged. When they started to look at the development of CM curriculum, half of the courses were already ready – building codes and standards, methods of building construction. Callahan and his colleague then developed civil and building cost estimating, scheduling, construction safety and construction project management courses. “We essentially leveraged existing courses and added new courses essentially dealing with CM subjects and were able to create a viable twoyear degree program,” Callahan said in a 2007 Contractor interview. “We always had in mind a four-year degree was going to come behind it in a short period of time. We knew the associate degree that was in place was designed as the first two years of a four-year degree. It’s rare in higher education to have that kind of design to that program.” Warren said many of her instructors brought with them a background in construction. “Some of them have been out of the construction industry, as far as working in it, for a number of years,” Warren said. “But in my equipment course, they brought in someone from the field to teach us what he’s doing right now. He told us, ‘This is what I do on my job, how I keep track of equipment, costs.’ He showed us spreadsheets that he uses. It was more reallife, up-to-date type stuff, which was very helpful.” Warren said the courses she took as part of the CM bachelor’s program hadn’t been taught before at UAA.
A back injury forced Lynnette Warren to leave her career as a journeyman carpenter in 2001. She received training for a new career in construction management at UAA and was one of four people in May who received a Bachelor of Science in Construction Management degree from the university. “We were the guinea pigs,” she laughed. “For it being a new course right out of the box, they do a pretty good job. Over time, overall, it will improve and be a program to be proud of for the university and the state of Alaska.” Construction is a good career in Alaska, she said. “Look around us,” Warren said. “In the 30 years I’ve lived here, things have changed so much. The construction industry is just growing leaps and bounds. The gas pipeline goes through, you don’t even want to know what the construction is going to be like. I mean, when the gas pipeline goes through, we’ll have probably another 100,000 people here in town added to what we already got. So construction, it ain’t going away. “We don’t have enough stuff to support the people we have here already, so it’s going to continually grow and we’ll just keep growing with it.” Tracy Kalytiak is a freelance writer in the Palmer area.
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Page 7 and 8: HOMER WATER TREATMENT PLANT PROJECT
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Page 19 and 20: SAFETY Kevin P. Welker, KIEWIT BUIL
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Page 25 and 26: gether at one of the family cabins
Page 28 and 29: Juneau’s “in school” program
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Page 32 and 33: Rural Alaska As in urban Alaska, th
Page 34 and 35: AGC of Alaska forms Construction Ed
Page 36 and 37: Construction Career Day introduces
Page 38 and 39: ilities during the few hours he was
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Page 44: CM students intern at Anchorage con
Page 47 and 48: Girl Scouts earned this patch for p
Page 49 and 50: A tourist walks along Fifth Avenue
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Page 54: Steel bridge team wins regional com
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Page 59 and 60: Past projects Other major past proj
Page 61 and 62: for the project. Coeur asked regula
Page 63 and 64: Kensington were estimated by Coeur
Page 65 and 66: “The Sutton job was a big overlay
Page 67 and 68: whether the second measure should b
Page 69 and 70: to the Fort Knox mine. Kinross Gold
Page 71 and 72: water ballot initiative. Parnell la
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Page 75 and 76: Aerial shot that shows the scope an
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Page 81 and 82: The blasting crew from Advanced Bla
Page 83 and 84: “My partner and I are fans of art
Page 86: The Politics of Construction Vote
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continued “Carlile continues to r
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The Alaska Contractor - Summer 2008

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