Month: February 2025

Earlier this year, I spent a lot of time thinking about compensation. I am in Construction Engineering Management, and our program works very hard to connect to job opportunities after school, so as long as one can pass their classes, do an internship or two (they are quite easy to get at the many CEM career fairs), a person is more likely than not to graduate college with a signed offer. I was lucky and received a job offer from my internship that I had completed, but I wanted to take my elder’s advice and seek out at least one more job offer. So I went through the interview process and received a job offer from another company that met my criteria of General Contractors, which I would like to work for (High Construction Volume, employee-owned).

Once I had two offers in hand I had to take a second and just sort of catch my breath, I was extremely grateful to be so fortunate to have these opportunities. Then came the hard part: negotiation and making a decision. Not to go too deep into the weeds of the offers but essentially: the offer from my internship company was a fair salary as well as non-exempt, with good benefits and essentially a guarantee I would get my shares vested within 2 years, and the second offer was a slightly higher amount of base salary, however it was exempt, and the timeline to vesting my employee ownership was less clear.

Given all of this, and knowing that I liked the people, workstyle, and culture of the company I interned with, I returned with a counteroffer asking for a signing bonus, and they accepted. This decision was highly driven by compensation, as I want to start working after college to start paying off my loans. Both jobs offered a lot of potential compensation, however I felt that the offer I accepted would both have a higher potential for upfront earnings as the position was non-exempt, so I will have the opportunity to earn overtime, as well as I will most likely get my shares vested much faster at this company, so I will be able to start acruing company equity which will provide further compensation.

I have had many different types of training for the various jobs that I have had before and during College. The two most distinct trainings that come to mind were the trainings I did for my internship at PCL construction, as well as the trainings that I did while I was working part-time at Harbor Freight.

First off, I want to say that of the various onboarding trainings I have done, Harbor Freight’s was by far the most intense for the Job itself. The first day was 8 hours of module based training on the standard operating procedure for the company as a whole as well as my role. This was not an engaging process, and I found myself overwhelmed with information that I was not able to take in entirely.

This is countered with the training that I received for my Summer Internship at PCL construction. The only real training besides my half-day orientation (which was mainly getting my computer and filling out paperwork) was the safety training I had to complete before arriving on site, which took about 2.5 hours. This training was more manageable, as I was able to pretty much only focus on the safety side of things, and it was a more gradual process than the Harbor Freight onboarding process, which felt like trying to drink from a fire hose.

In terms of the actual Job-specific training, I felt like Harbor Freight had a good system once I was over the actual hump of the onboarding process. Using technology-assisted on-the-job training, I was able to start learning the layout of the warehouse, while actually starting to stock the shelves and learning about how the Inventory system works. When there were new tasks to accomplish such as unloading a truck day, or updating the shelves with a new planogram, my manager stayed on top of me completing the online training module before, and then working with an experienced associate to take on the new task.

At my internship at PCL, the learning curve was a lot steeper, and to give them credit, it is very difficult to create a training program for construction management at any given point on a project, especially with no experience. The trainings that I did have were mostly about safety, or the company’s policies, and didn’t really pertain to what was going on on the job at a given moment. This made it a challenge but very engaging for me to learn and work to make myself an asset for my boss, which ended up being a very fulfilling summer.

Overall, I think that Harbor Freight had a more effective job-specific training program and that PCL had a more engaging onboarding process. I enjoyed the technology-assisted on-the-job training at Harbor Freight and felt that was quite effective in teaching me each activity.

The Challenges of Maintaining Job Descriptions

With today’s job market being so tumultuous, it is becoming more and more important for both people seeking jobs, as well as those looking to hire, that job descriptions are kept as accurate and up-to-date as possible. Especially when jobs now can rely on the understanding of a coding language, specific project management software, or other specific technical knowledge, employers need to keep their posted job descriptions transparent and clear.

Many view job descriptions as static when in reality they should be looked at as amendable, flexible, living documents, that can and should be reviewed at least once a year (Tyler, 2013). The employees who do the job, along with their managers, should review the job description regularly with HR to ensure that the job being marketed is as accurate as possible. Additionally, depending on the level of inaccuracy, a misleading job description could get a company in legal trouble.

The largest challenge with job descriptions can be the nature of the jobs that are being described, as in some jobs can be easy to quantify into a job description, and some can be much more nebulous to describe with a simple list of tasks. HR departments can use different types of analyzing jobs to better describe them in job descriptions. Instead of sticking to a list of routine tasks that that job will perform, employers could offer a list of skills required, and problems that they will be required to solve on the job, for example.

Creating and maintaining accurate job descriptions is an oft-overlooked and underappreciated task for HR managers. By leveraging employee collaboration to review and revise job descriptions, and treating them as living documents, as well as changing how jobs are described, companies will be more successful in recruiting and retaining employees who will be happier because their actual job matches closely with the job that they applied for. 

Sources:

Tyler, Kathryn. “Job Worth Doing: Update Descriptions” SHRM. Last modified January 1, 2013. https://www.shrm.org/topics-tools/news/hr-magazine/job-worth-update-descriptions.