My last job working for a general contractor with a well established family company in the community was a slightly unique situation. I had no construction experience at all, but I had been on a ground crew for a logging company before. There was no job posting or job description, I just emailed the contractor because it was a friend of a friend of a friend type situation. I wrote to him asking if he needed help at work and that I was willing to do manual labor and work full time. He got back to me and we set up a meeting time to go over our schedules, and then I was on the jobsite the next monday working full time 40 hour weeks for what turned out to be three summers in a row. Although there was no job description or application process, I really wanted to get my feet in the water in the construction industry because my major at the time was Construction Engineering, so reaching out to contractors was my way of getting into this gig.
I ended up doing so many things the past three summers, from installing appliances and cabinets, demolition, painting, digging gas and plumbing trenches, driving excavators, using saws and other power tools, and filling the trailer countless times with debris and trash, all of which I had pretty much zero experience in previous to taking this job. Now that I have been through that, I think it really helped me secure my internship for this upcoming summer because I have a decent background in construction. Sometimes even when the job sites don’t have a lot of what you are looking for, it helps to reach out to companies that you are interested in working for to see if they have an opportunity that can really benefit your progression in your career.
