The last job I had was for an Internship for Hoffman Construction for the role of a Project Engineer. Before applying for the job I remember to look at the job description for the company and was surprised by how detailed it was. For people that don’t know, project engineers have a very long list of tasks that they have to perform and it’s very hard to list all of them. I knew this prior to reading the job description and was very surprised by how detailed they made there’s. It made me feel good to apply for the position because it showed that they were very particular in detail and thorough in there work. When having my first day it matched up pretty well with how the job description was laid out. They said that there would be a lot of training and posting RFI’s and submittals. This is pretty much would I did for most of the Internship. There is a lot of training the engineers have to go through in order to be ready to be given tasks. The reason for this is because our jobs are very complex and need a high level of confidence in order to do your job good. You are also in charge of managing billion-dollar contracts and you have to make sure all of the structures are to code. Some things that were not in the job descriptions that were in the job that surprised me were how they did there breaks and lunches. In construction, things are going constantly and you never know when you will have to talk to the contractors and have meetings with them. This makes it very hard to have set breaks and lunches. A lot of the time you don’t get any set ’15 min breaks’. This is because of how everyone days fluctuate and there are a lot of times that you are chilling and not doing much in between meetings and during the day. After the internship was over, I was very pleased with how it went. I was fortunate and received an offer at the end and happily accepted it. With them providing a very descriptive job description I knew exactly what I was going into which helped me prepare for it.
2 replies on “Job Description”
Hi Ryan,
I think it says a lot about a company to provide a detailed job description for an internship because companies don’t always put time and effort into these programs. Not only it is reassuring for an applicant, but it gives them a sense of how the company is. As you mentioned, your impression of the lengthy job description was that the company was detail-oriented and thorough with their work. You talked about breaks and lunches and how they were very random, do you wish Hoffman Construction would have had something in the job description discussing them? Do you think this is necessary to include? Thanks for sharing!
Delani
Ryan,
Good job on your post. I currently wok for a general contractor training to be a project manager and I do a lot of the same tasks that you talked about here but probably on a smaller scale as we are not nearly as large as Hoffman. I agree that it is really nice when companies make their job descriptions very long and detailed because it really helps you gain a better understanding of what kind of work you will be doing and it also allows you to be prepared for what kinds of tasks you will be completing.