Take a minute, imagine yourself designing, watching, and overseeing the construction of a building. Well that is what construction management is in a jist. Exploring construction management entails many things such as, what is construction management, the different types of projects, and the skills needed to be successful. Now we’re going to dive into what each of those are.

So you may be asking yourself, what even is construction management. According to Kristen Anderson, “On a broad scale construction management is overseeing all aspects of the construction process, such as, negotiating prices, overseeing contractors, ownership representation, and keeping your ownership in mind with every decision, and the closeout phase, all of which includes a lot of before and after planning”. It is also needed to know how to structure a team for a project. For example, Lynne Dahl, Vice president of construction management at Hempel Companies said, “When putting a team together, I look at what’s needed, look at the strength, and who’s on the team and then I assign tasks by people’s strengths and weaknesses”. That is what construction management is on a broad scale, but also there are different types of projects that construction managers work on as well.

Projects include everything from small tenant improvements all the way to multi million dollar buildings. That is the wide range of different projects that construction managers work on. Small tenant improvement is fitting-out a space in a pre-existing building. It involves things such as, new paint and new flooring. Whereas when they deal with multi million dollar construction projects it involves the entire construction process which takes around 10 months to complete, design, consultations, and working with the city officials. In addition to the different types of projects they deal with they also need certain skills to be successful in what they do.

Just like all careers you need to have certain skills to be successful in what you do. According to John Patterson, CFO of FendlerPatterson, “There are certain roles and skills you need to be able to do to become a construction manager, those being, estimating, scheduling, problem solving, and being able to conduct proper research”. These are just some of the needed skills that construction managers need to have, others include, attention to detail, great follow-up, and the ability to interact well with others, think quickly, troubleshoot, deal with numbers and work both independently and with a group. Now let’s look over everything we just learned.

Overall construction management is, supervising the construction and design of a project while also keeping it on time and budget. We talked about what construction management is, what the different types of projects are, and the skills needed to be successful. There is much more to cons

truction management than this, construction managers also, structure teams for projects, handle rude tenants, juggling multiple projects at once, for example Dahl has 45 different properties to manage right now. You may be asking, why does any of this matter? Well without construction managers we wouldn’t have malls, restaurants, coffee shops, office buildings, or any other building.